blogging (1-2342) life; title=Basko
* Time is no measure, but it's been more than two years now...
* And it doesn't belong here and I cannot convey these feelings with words
anyhow and still.(..!) So I won't even try.
* Feiner Hund. Ganz ganz ganz feiner [1 Hund]..
[1] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/480_linuxhotel/100_0660_Sm.jpg.44.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sat, 02 Jun 20120 00:23:42 +0200
blogging (1-239) life; title=cooking chicken with rice
* If you know me a bit, you will probably be surprised to hear that I will
cook a complete chicken (well, without the feathers) today, then remove
all bones and add rice. It's for my lovely dog, who needs special food
nowadays...
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:09:22 +0100
blogging (1-238) life; title=a PR desaster
* I envisioned to write a happy blog post how we managed to finally release
Debian Edu 5.0.4+edu0...
* Something I was really proud about and which I will probably be proud again
one day.
* For now I can just say, that I now have learned that proper release
management needs to include release announcement release management.
* Oh well. Hope you enjoy Debian Edu 5.0.4+edu0!
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:30:01 +0100
blogging (1-237) life; title=FOSDEM - video helpers needed and DPL election
* [1 FOSDEM] is the usual awesomeness this year, I'm just too tired for too
many words, so I'll keep this post very brief.
* Once again, the videoteam needs your help. Please consider lending us your
helping hands, so that we can record the room 1308 tomorrow/today (sunday)
without burning out totally. From 10oo to 17oo there are seven talks
scheduled with a total break time of 30min. And we are 3 or 4 people doing
this, and have 4 jobs to fullfill: 2 camera operators, video and
audio-mixer, not even mentioning handing microphones to the people in the
audience. This obviously really cannot work.
* So, if you can, please help us. Either just show up or even better, just
show up and add yourself at the [2 volunteer wiki page]. Doing the latter
will help us even more, as we can plan our ad-hoc work better.
* Following an idea originated through contributions from Belgian beer, and
to motivate [3 zack] a bit more to actually go for it, I've setup the
alias leader@debian-community.org to point to his email address.
Please send motivational emails ;-)
[1] http://fosdem.org
[2] http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/FOSDEM10/Videoteam/Volunteers
[3] http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/planet-debian/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:21:41 +0100
blogging (1-236) life; title=#563195 RFH: usplash -- Userspace bootsplash utility
* Two weeks ago I filed #[1 563195], which reads:
* the current maintainer welcomed me into the usplash maintainance team,
because they are busy with other stuff. Unfortunatly, I'm too busy to give
usplash the attention it needs as well.
* So I still plan to spend some work on usplash, but I definitly also need
help, thus I'm filing this bug.
* My basic idea is to upload to experimental based on the upstream version
ASAP and frequently, and then upload to unstable once it works ;-)
* If you are interested and able to jump in, please reply to this bug.
* That's all still the case. The area where help is most welcome atm is to
actually make the latest upstream version work without upstart again,
as far as I could see on a quick look, upstream has removed support for
other initsystems... once we have a working package again, attacking the
bugs in the BTS is next.
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/563195
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:20:59 +0100
blogging (1-235) life; title=Debian Wine soon to be sold out?
* In case you want to buy some (more) bottles of wine made for DebConf9, you
need to hurry up. Also a bit more hurry is appropriate if you want it to
be delivered til XMas :-)
* <a href="http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWine"><img src="https://www.kluenter.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/HPIM4155-300x224.jpg"/></a>
* (Picture credit belongs to Chris.)
* I'm planing another (offline) sale at the 26C3 congress in Berlin at the
end of the year, which might or might not work out. If it does, the number
of bottles available for online ordering will be reduced significantly,
and basically I'm only waiting for some details to be finalized for
announcing this for real, so hurry up and mail order now - unless you have
enough Debian wine bottles at home already :-)
* Information how to order is available in our wiki at [1 DebianWine]. The
profit made will be given to DebConf9, and as that has been dealt with
finacially successfully, it will be given to DebConf10!
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWine
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:50:34 +0100
blogging (1-234) life; title=evil hypocrat and failbook
* Oh wow. I try hard to keep laughing but it's so sad it's almost
not funny at all. I definitly prefer straight face evil to hypocrats
and I know why I prefer real life, real friends and real social networks,
with people, not bits. [1 Read for yourself.]
* Orwell was an optimist.
[1] http://jwz.livejournal.com/1137141.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:10:18 +0100
blogging (1-233) life; title=We just want your best - your attention
* Hi. If you are interested to get an invitation to my bathroom or kitchen,
drop me a mail. I have currently 42 invitations I can give out.
* I believe this is to most people as interesting as yet another wave of
invitations to yet another online service aiming at your data, soul and
money. I really don't get why people are falling for the hype of yet
another [1 useless product].
* Current mood: bored.
[1] http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/web/2009112501-google-wave-rollout.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:08:25 +0100
blogging (1-232) life; title=munin 1.4.0 in experimental
* Saturday I have uploaded munin 1.4.0~beta-1 to experimental, though
it is currently awaiting NEW processing, as it introduces new binary
packages. This upload is due to the awesome work of Tom Feiner who
joined the munin maintainers team following up on the [1 RFH bug]
I filed in July 2009. At first, Tom helped out with some bug triaging
and worked on some patches. So he then got commit access (to the svn
repo which hosts both upstream code as well as the debian packaging),
which quite soon he also used to fix issues in upstreams trunk too and
finally prepared this release mostly on his own, with me just doing
some mentoring work. Overall, I'm totally impressed and happy with
his work on the package. Tom, kudos & thanks a lot!
* Munin 1.4.0 comes with a lot of new features (the most important
ones being SSL and multigraph support) and new plugins, and of
course, lots of bugfixes too. If you're curious, read the
[2 upstream changelog]. Also noteworthy, the number of (Debian) patches
has gone down from 64 to 8!
* Please report bugs and experiences to munin-users@lists.sourceforge.net
unless they are specific to the Debian package, in that case, please use
the BTS as usual. The final 1.4.0 release is scheduled for this friday,
unless real blockers are dicovered :-) Expect it to hit unstable on
friday or saturday too, unless real life or other blockers prevent
it :-)
* If this post has made you curious and you cannot wait for the
package to leave NEW, svn-buildpackage it yourself from the
[3 debian experimental branch].
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/535691
[2] http://munin.projects.linpro.no/browser/trunk/ChangeLog
[3] http://munin.projects.linpro.no/browser/branches/debian/experimental
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:34:32 +0100
blogging (1-231) life; title=Customized Blends
* Almost exactly a year ago, the term "Custom Debian Distribution" was
changed to [1 "Debian Pure Blends"] to better reflect what it is about:
a variation of Debian within Debian. So far, so good. Then there are also
"Debian Blends", which are not pure, meaning they have some parts which
are not yet in Debian.
* But the intention is clear, a Debian Blend aims to be fully part of
Debian.
* This week it occured to me that there is something else, something which
is widely done and which is something else, so it should have it's own
term: "Customized Blends", where some parts of the "distribution" is taken
from a Debian Blend, while there are others, which are customisations,
which are not likely or even desired/possible to end up in Debian.
* As I see it, LiMUX is such a distribution, or what is installed in the
schools in Extremadura or Rheinland-Pfalz atm. Mostly the software they
use is Debian (either from stable or backported version), while some parts
are not, like bookmarks, wallpapers, custom (sometimes propietary) software
or firmware for specific hardware.
* My motivation in pointing this is out, is to create an awareness
that those "Customized Blends" are an important and frequent part of the
Debian Blends ecosystem _and_ that it's for their own benefit to contribute
back. Minimising the diff to a "real" pure Blend is good :-)
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/11/msg00001.html
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:25:26 +0100
blogging (1-230) life; title=usplash-theme-debian uploaded to sid
* Today I've uploaded [1 usplash-theme-debian]_5 to sid, making it
the first upload since more than two years. To celebrate this and
to make the (upcoming) change(s more) visible, I've exchanged the
artwork against the one [2 by Chad Albers]. In the future I plan to
provide alternative splash images too, like the one done for [3 Lenny]
(which sadly was never uploaded), a new one for [4 Squeeze] (once there
is one) or this [5 darker theme]. Of course, the old theme will also
be reintroduced by then and equally of course, I'm interested to hear
about more good artwork!
* If you want to help out, usplash-theme-debian is maintained in the
[6 collab-maint] repository in alioth and the BTS is eagerly waiting
for your bug reports and patches :-) Currently supported resolutions
are 640x400, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1365x768 and 1600x1200.
1024x600, 1280x1024, 1440x1050 and 1900x1200 are already on my list
of what's nice to have, what other resolutions are there you need
to have? :-)
* And then, I plan to upload a new version of usplash itself eventually
as well, and again, I'd be delighted if someone would work on this
with me... :-)
* I'll publish this post on debian-devel@lists.debian.org, please reply there. Thank you.
[1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/u/usplash-theme-debian.html
[2] http://debianart.org/cchost/?ccm=/media/files/neomantic/422
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianDesktopArtworkLenny
[4] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianDesktopArtworkSqueeze
[5] http://www.debianart.org/cchost/?ccm=/media/files/si0ux/276
[6] git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/usplash-theme-debian.git
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:06:52 +0200
blogging (1-229) life; title=Debian wine from DebConf9
* [1 Debian 5.0.2 wine], which was made to support DebConf9, is finally
available to be bought on the internetz. Currently the shop user
interface is German language only, but I've heard that this will be fixed
eventually.
* Enjoy!
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWine
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:48:02 +0200
blogging (1-228) life; title=I'm so happy I went to bed...
* I'm currently in Taipeh, having attended the [1 Debian MiniConf]
there (which btw was awesome! Thanks Andrew, Arne and everybody else
who contributed to that!), and yesterday I went to sleep shortly after
midnight, which was exactly the time in Germany when the first election
predictions were published...
* During the day I was pondering to do exactly that, and luckily
I forgot about the idea (and the whole elections - I didn't expect anything
interesting or good coming from it), else my curiosity would have probably
have made me check some newssites and harm my sleep. Ignorance is bliss,
sometimes.
* I guess the only positive thing I can say about the results is that
the pirate party got 2% of the votes, and in Hamburg even 2.6% or so,
with more then 10% in some parts of the city... (final results still
pending).
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianTaiwan/MiniDebConf2009
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:20:23 +0200
blogging (1-227) life; title=finally released
* I've just uploaded and released piuparts 0.36, something which I should
have done much earlier.
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:49:04 +0200
blogging (1-226) life; title=upstream debian dir
* [1 Convinced]. "mostly because of _hyst(e|o)rical_ tool limitations."
* Emphasis mine.
[1] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/look_who__39__s_packaging/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Tue, 08 Sep 2009 06:54:28 +0200
blogging (1-225) life; title=Eminem vs Nena
* [1 Eminem vs Nena] - incredible good, unbelievable matching the rhytm! To
be played loud and until the end! :-)
* <b>Update:</b> After listening to the original song "Lose yourself" from
Eminem I must say that I'm once again impressed by the achievements of
modern computer technology. One cannot believe audio recordings anymore.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYKq2f2-N-4
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:30:12 +0200
blogging (1-224) life; title=Debian tea+wine party at HAR
* In roughly 3h (14oo localtime) a group of Debian tea+wine and other
lovers will gather at the Debian village^woutpost at [1 har2009.org]
to celebrate the 0x10th birthday of the project! The outpost is located
on the left rear of the OpenBSD tent - so if you're at HAR, join us
and if you don't, make sure to be at the followup event in four years
to celebrate Debians 20th then!
* Oh, for those not aware that this is a four days camping event:
that's why I doubt there will be any tasty cheese left, so I rather
propose a tea+wine party. And because I have a bottle of [2 Debian wine]
with me... :-)
* I might find some more time to write another short blogpost about HAR,
right now I'm busy getting breakfast and then I'll prepare packing,
which mostly translates to relaxing and RL chatting :-) In short,
HAR was amazing and inspiring - look at the pics, wiki, the schedule
and the recorded videos! :-)
[1] http://har2009.org
[2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/aigarius/3745140041/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sun, 16 Aug 2009 11:23:42 +0200
blogging (1-223) life; title=saying good-bye to etch and roundcube backport for lenny
* Today I upgraded my last system from etch to lenny, so I'm now only
dealing with etch for a work project and for Debian Edu, where we still
need to finish our lenny based release.
* While at it, I also built backports of roundcube, php-mdb2 and
php-mdb2-driver-sqlite for lenny, which I plan to upload to backports.org
once roundcube from unstable migrated to squeeze. If someone wants to have
them earlier, drop me a mail, the backporting is really trivial...
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:51:15 +0200
blogging (1-222) life; title=#535691 - RFH: munin packaging help
* package: wnpp<br>
x-debbugs-cc: munin-deb-maint@linpro.no, munin-users@lists.sourceforge.net
* The [1 munin package could need some more love]:<br>
- currently there are 35 open bugs, some with patches, some need to go
upstream, etc. - and there is a [2 constant flow of new bugs coming].<br>
- the Debian package has 55 patches applied. Few are Debian specific, many
have been applied upstream in the 1.3 branch, but some not. Unfortunatly,
we don't have an overview about which patch is in which category...<br>
- munin 1.3 is about to from alpha to beta status and 1.4 might even be
released in time for squeeze. It would be awesome to upload 1.3 to
experimental soon, to get more testing.<br>
- while uploaders lists five people, most work in the last year has been
done by two and most work in the last half year has been done by one
person...
* If you are interested in helping out, no matter whether you are a DD, DM or
not, please contact me or just start working:<br>
- BTS cleanup<br>
- patch renaming (1xx_* = debian-specific, 2xx_* = applied in 1.3, etc)<br>
- packaging 1.3
* Thanks.
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/535691
[2] http://people.debian.org/~glandium/bts/m/munin.png
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Sat, 04 Jul 2009 13:42:38 +0200
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 bit ugly,
but hey, it's tab9, I don't care (for the time being).
* Besides those two issues I'm really happy. It's fast, it's slick, it
doesn't get in the way, floating mode rocks, switching between modes
rocks, the default keyboard shortcuts make sense and I use the mouse less
often. Plus the author is a nice fellow. And by now it even got
documentation!
* Oh, another issue: The cat is gone. That's totally unacceptable. Therefore
I propose to fork awesome and bring back the cat and call the fork TWMFKAA ;-)
[1] http://awesome.naquadah.org/roadmap/
[2] http://packages.qa.debian.org/docker
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/network-manager-gnome
[4] http://packages.qa.debian.org/xfce4-panel
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 12 Dec 2007 20:06:55 +0100
blogging (1-142) life; title=not yet awesome enough
* While I'm still running awesome as my window manager currently and though I
do like it, I will switch back to ion on the next login. "Some XRandR
support" is not yet enough... it crashes when I add or remove a screen.
* Besides that, the only other thing missing is that I have not yet found
out how to use <pre>docker</pre> sensibly. Hints welcome.
* So overall: looks very promising, but not yet a feature complete
replacement for me. But good things will come to those who wait :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 9 Dec 2007 10:22:36 +0100
blogging (1-141) life; title=awesome reading
* When I was a kid, I often started to read a book and didn't do anything
until I finished it. This is what I did yesterday until this morning
again... :-) Nowadays I do this rarely, but if it's happens, I have a lot
of fun in a fictional world.
* Now that I finished the book I decided it's a good time to give awesome a
try. And unlike the last time, which was last week in a plane, I now also
have access to the documentation, which makes using it a lot easier :)
* I think I like awesome already, after just five minutes. Even if there are
three things I'm currently missing: runniny arbituary commands with F3,
ssh with F4 and the cute cat on the awesome webpage. I think it's totally
unawesome that it's gone!!!
* And for those wondering what awesome is: it allows me to say "good-bye
ion" :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 8 Dec 2007 15:20:46 +0100
blogging (1-140) life; title=what is going on in Venezuela
* Obviously I don't know, but I guess that [1 this article] is much closer
to the truth than most of the news sites and magazines.
[1] http://www.gregpalast.com/fear-of-chavez-is-fear-of-democracy/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 5 Dec 2007 18:49:02 +0100
blogging (1-139) life; title=five in seven and four in one
* On friday the 16th I blogged that I hoped to manage to upload five package
in the next seven days and I've made it! Yay!
* Ok, for the last upload I cheated, I uploaded it 5 minutes after midnight
UTC, while normally I'm on MET :) The packages I uploaded were: [1 olsrd]
(new upstream release), [2 tuxmath] (new upstream release, I already
blogged about it), [3 tuxtype] (just adding Vcs-pseudo headers),
[4 debian-edu-doc] (made it through NEW already, yay, more in a dedicated
blog post soon) and [5 batmand] (closing ITP #405588, still in NEW. This
package was mostly prepared by Wesley Tsai, thanks and I'm looking forward
to meet you in December :)
* Yesterday I was too busy with RL and with preparing the upcoming
[6 Debian Edu r1 release] to blog about the above and now I'm also not
really in the mood to add more links and information (like how to provide
translations for tuxtype, tuxmath or debian-edu-doc...)
* Because my current mood is: happy and hungry! Very hungry.
* I've spent the morning reviewing the last four packages for the r1 edu
release, accepting them into our etch and sending [7 announcements], which
were eaten by a configuration problem. But the listmasters are aware
of the problem and I'm confident they'll resolve it soon. Otherwise
we can't send the release announcement out, something I'm really looking
forward to finally see happen after four months of work! The only things
left to do now are testing and finishing the release notes and the press
release :)
* Out for lunch!
[1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/olsrd
[2] http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-138
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/tuxtype
[4] http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc
[5] https://www.open-mesh.net/batman
[6] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/roadmap
[7] http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 25 Nov 2007 14:26:28 +0100
blogging (1-138) life; title=shiny and localized tuxmath
* Yesterday I've uploaded a shiny new upstream version of [1 tuxmath].
Besides many bugfixes, new "crystal" icons, hall of fame, a demo mode,
being able to track completed lessons and better configuration options
(you can create your own lessons now), this version also finally supports
localisation. Yay!
* But, as this feature is really new, there are only translations for dutch,
czech, norwegian bokmål and nynorsk available. So if you have a moment to
spare, please consider translating those 84 strings, which are probably
20-30 unique strings, the rest being variations. (Divided by 3, divided by
4, etc...)
* Please file them as [2 wishlist bugs against the package]. Thanks!
[1] http://packages.debian.org/tuxmath
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/tuxmath
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 18 Nov 2007 12:47:51 +0100
blogging (1-137) life; title=first snow
* Inspired by a certain blog/foo post, I want to announce that I've seen my
first snow of this winter last night, too. Not enough to really cover the
ground, but a bit to at least give the impression the ground ist covered.
* I don't mind the cold, as long as it isn't raining. Since two days it's so
cold that the dog isn't muddy after walking him, and that's quite good.
Still I really look forward to be in Spain next friday, and little because
of the weather ;-)
* And I would be really happy if I manage to do five uploads to Debian
within the next seven days, though only three would already make me happy.
And now back to non-Debian work...
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:05:44 +0100
blogging (1-136) life; title=new Debian stickers coming soon
* Some time ago I met Colle from the CCC who told me she could create
Debian stickers like the ones [1 seppy] used to make. And today I saw
the first preview:
<img src="http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/debian-sticker.jpg" />
* If you want one or some, make sure you'll attend [2 24C3] or wait til we
meet the next time :-) Remember: good things...
* Thanks a lot to Colle for dealing with the printing!
[1] http://people.debian.org/~seppy/
[2] http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 7 Nov 2007 19:02:36 +0100
blogging (1-135) life; title=The day the routers die
* [1 I suppose you better give it a try]. Wow.
* Unrelated, there is now [2 planet.it.debian-community.org] for the italian
(speaking) debian community. Yay.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y36fG2Oba0
[2] http://wiki.debian-community.org/planets/it/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:28:24 +0100
blogging (1-134) life; title=Debian contributor planets
* This blog post is long overdue, but mostly due to spending too much time on
Debian Edu (and to little on d-c.org), I haven't got around writing this.
* Since about a month an [1 english] and a [2 german] planet has been set up
as part of [3 debian-community.org] and is waiting for you to add your
feed. Yes, that's right, currently everybody can add any feed. This might
change, if/when this is abused, but currently we're still able to operate
in good faith :-) Just edit the "list of feeds".
* It's also trivial to create planets for other languages, in case you are
interested. Just drop by in #debian-community on OFTC and we'll set it up.
* And now, back to work, so that I can soon blog about some, as I think,
exciting news about Debian Edu.
[1] http://planet.en.debian-community.org/
[2] http://planet.de.debian-community.org/
[3] http://debian-community.org/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:16:08 +0200
blogging (1-133) life; title=Small report from the meeting in Extremadura
* The last five days I've spent at the combined Debian Edu, FAI and CDD
meeting in [1 Mérida] in Extremadura, together with 17 others. The Debian
Edu / Skolelinux crowd was the biggest, followed by FAI, followed by CDD
people, though many were part of more than one project. "As usual" it was
great to meet many known faces and some unknown ones and to be able to
discuss stuff in [2 RL].
* Besides various small different things, I worked on the Debian Edu etch r1
release, our lenny roadmap (see the bottom of our [3 roadmap page] which
also covers etch r1) and the (technical side of the) german translation of
the [4 Debian Edu documentation]. Non edu related the new
[5 setupharddisk2] for FAI took most of my brain activity. And I've signed
all keys allready :-)
* We stayed at a very nice hotel in the even much nicer city of Merida,
which features a lot of roman ruins and history. For example, we walked
over the biggest roman bridge in the world! The only thing that was bigger
was the amount of good food we were forced to eat every day... Incredible.
This was my second visit to Merida and this time I finally managed to
visit the amphitheatre (with seats for 15000 people) and the Roman
theatre. (Unfortunatly the english page about [6 Emerita Augusta] is a
stub.) If you happen to come around that area make sure to spend some time
sight seeing, it is really worth it! People living in Merida literally
fear to rebuild their houses, because as soon as they start to dig, they
find something historical and have to turn their property into a museum
:-)
* In case you have not seen it yet, you should watch this small movie
from euro news about the [7 free software efforts in Extremadura].
Insightful and very good promotion, also to show around.
* Many thanks to César, José Luis and the Junta de Extremdura for hosting
such a great meeting! You rock!
* On a unrelated note, spam has gone crazy yesterday while traveling back,
15000 mails were not catched by my so far well working setup. ARG. I still
used to have a catchall setting, which was useful to give out addresses
like $company@mydomain, but now I will explicitly list those addresses and
disable catchall. And luckily for you I will not blog about every spam
mail I got... :) Generally I dont consider spam (the source of) evil, it's
money: as long as money rules the world, there will be spam. So since it's
a social problem, it is hardly solvable by technology. (That is, as long
as you want to receive mails from strangers, which I do.) IMO what's worse
than spammers are autoresponders to spam. Most of those 15000 mails were
auto-replies to spam. OMFSM.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mérida,_Spain
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Extremadura2007/Schedule
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/roadmap
[4] http://wiki.skolelinux.no/DebianEdu/Documentation/Etch/
[5] http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/index.php/Setup_harddisks_2
[6] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerita_Augusta
[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR8Oh0Js_lA
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 22 Oct 2007 15:27:56 +0200
blogging (1-132) life; title=mediawiki diffs and lazyweb
* Dear lazyplanet, I follow two mediawikis via reading the changes with RSS,
and I cannot really follow them well, as the diffs are not very readable.
For moinmoin wikis this is no issue, there are nice diff mails one can
subscribe to. Does anybody know a way to configure mediawiki, so that it's
possible to read the diffs? Or, an example of such a setup? If you do,
please contact me. Thanks.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 20 Oct 2007 17:15:56 +0200
blogging (1-131) life; title=Pleased
* Unfortunatly I couldn't attend yesterdays DebConf8 meeting, because
fortunatly an old friend of mine whom I haven't seen for almost five years
visited me. So I was very pleased when I came home later that evening and
could easily read the [1 minutes] provided by [2 meetbot]. I love it when
a plan comes together! :-)
[1] http://meetbot.debian.net/meetbot/debconf-team.20071015_1858.html
[2] http://meetbot.debian.net
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 16 Oct 2007 08:35:59 +0200
blogging (1-130) life; title=Home sweet etch
* All machines, virtual or not, at home now run etch. Yay. Actually, /me
powers up a seldom used server to upgrade that one too :-)
* Six more to go and then I'm ready for lenny ;-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:31:44 +0200
blogging (1-129) life; title=meetbot to help IRC meetings
* On monday we held our first [1 Debian Edu IRC meeting] with the help of
[2 MeetBot]. MeetBot is just a very simple bot, actually it's a plugin for
[3 eggdrop], which can help with structuring a meeting, publishing logs
and writting the minutes. It's purpose is to help a human to chair a
meeting, not to chair the meeting on it's own. Because except for
publishing the logs it cannot do anything alone :-)
* Currently the bot idles in #debian-edu, #debconf-team and #debian-boot,
drop me a note if you are interested in trying it in another channel.
There's a wishlist and a small howto on it's homepage.
* Have fun (with shorter post-processing of meetings! :)
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Meeting/
[2] http://meetbot.debian.net/
[3] http://packages.debian.org/eggdrop
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:01:04 +0200
blogging (1-128) life; title=For those who think Debian is too picky
* Thanks kaol, [1 this comic] really makes my day! Best viewed in iceweasel
:-D
[1] http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/bonobo-conspiracy/?i=749
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 27 Sep 2007 12:48:38 +0200
blogging (1-127) life; title=Not quite a router
* Aigars, the fonera is a nice box, it justs lacks a second LAN port.
[1 See for yourself] :-)
[1] http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Fon/Fonera
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:22:40 +0200
blogging (1-126) life; title=Democracy as you knew it is over
* A new law is being made in germany, which will make consentual sex between
minors a crime, which has to be punished with four years of prison at
least, plus ending up in a sexual offenders database for life. I, for
one, do not welcome our new taliban overlords.
* These [1 two] [2 articles] explain the situation in full detail (in
german).
* In other news, it's 102 days until all electronic communication in germany
(as in the EU) will be logged for half a year. (Until a terrorist attack
happens which was planned for more than half a year...) This includes all
emails sent, the location data of all mobile phones, every webpage visited
and so on. From everybody. If you are in Berlin tomorrow, go [3 demonstrate].
I, for one, do not welcome George Orwells lack of imagination, 1984 looks
really pale today. (But it's still a good read.)
* My next blog post shall take place in teletubby land again and shall
feature smileys as well. Sigh.
[1] http://karlweiss.twoday.net/stories/4148132/
[2] http://karlweiss.twoday.net/stories/4227933/
[3] http://www.freiheitstattangst.de
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:10:38 +0200
blogging (1-125) life; title=fixxx bugs like Joey Hess
* [1 Less than an hour]. Thanks! :-)
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/443213
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:08:42 +0200
blogging (1-124) life; title=some simple backports
* [1 Bernd] blogged about the new version of gimp-plugin-registry he
packaged, which includes the cool new [2 GIMP Liquid rescale plug-in]
which I had to try out. It really rocks, though it is much slower than in
that video.
* Anyway, backports for etch are available at "deb http://layer-acht.org/debian etch backports"
Those are simple rebuilds of gimp-plugin-registry and opencv.
* If you replace backports with xorg or xorg-experimental you'll also find
rebuilds of xorg for etch, either from lenny or from experimental. They
are slightly outdated (built two weeks ago) and need to updated against
the newer sources, but they work for me.
[1] http://bzed.de/blog/gimp-plugin-registry_0.3.1-1
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NcIJXTlugc
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 15 Sep 2007 10:05:57 +0200
blogging (1-123) life; title=dancing and singing
* Today I'm dancing and singing. :-)
* In part because I've just uploaded a new version of [1 tuxmath] which IMO
has a great improvement: tuxmath is a math game for children, where the
player has to solve little math computations, otherwise the cities on the
bottom of the screen get destroyed like in space invaders. Which is not
exactly suited very well for little children. So the idea came up, to
instead use igloos, which melt, so that in the end a penguin has to escape
from the igloo when it gets destroyed. Very cute, but still the same
gameplay. And the best thing is, those igloos were painted by a third
grade daughter of one the developers.
[1] http://packages.debian.org/tuxmath
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 3 Sep 2007 10:14:24 +0200
blogging (1-122) life; title=nine days later
* I'm now only down to 55 unread mails, but I'm happy, as I'm now in the
region where those mails mean actual todo stuff.
* And, this weekend I've been mostly offline, having fun at a free festival.
Thus enjoying my second day without internet this year and my first day
without speaking or reading/writing english - though I enjoyed that much
less :-)
* [1 Joey], thanks for your suggestion to turn down the frequency of polling
mails. I'm happily polling every 30 minutes now too, and thinking of going
down to every 60 minutes.
[1] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/inbox_zero/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 28 Aug 2007 16:31:19 +0200
blogging (1-121) life; title=Red Cross sued for using the red cross
* Various newspapers report that the health product giant Johnson & Johnson
is suing the Red Cross for using the red cross as a logo. Johnson &
Johnson registered the trademark in 1887, six years after the us-american
Red Cross started to use it. Needless to say, that a red cross has been in
use for much longer and that european Red Cross associations also exist
for quite some more years.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 20 Aug 2007 08:59:07 +0200
blogging (1-120) life; title=again
* Again I have 99 unread mails in my mailbox ;-)
* More than two weeks ago I watched [1 Inbox zero], which I recommend you
to watch if you have problems coping with your inbox, even if it mostly
boils down to "getting things done".
* /me smiles and continues to update tuxmath :-)
[1] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=973149761529535925
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 19 Aug 2007 14:45:08 +0200
blogging (1-119) life; title=Debians 24th birthday
* So Debian is now 14 years old - ignoring the timezone differences :-)
Thanks for all your contributions and have fun with Debian today and
everyday! ;-)
* While thinking about it, I remembered a question I was recently asked in
an interview to look into my crystal ball and tell how Debian will look
like in ten years. I couldn't really figure out a concrete answer, I just
said vaguely that I hope it changes in some ways, while I hope other
things stay like they are.
* What do you think?
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:31:48 +0200
blogging (1-118) life; title=First three days of CCCamp
* It's shortly after midnight and day one of the cccamp is "over". Which
doesn't mean the "first" day is over at all, lots of intergalactic
hackerparties are going on and besides, most people didn't arrive today
but earlier.
* I guess the most amazing thing I've seen where two people forging two
different kinds of steel, something I haven't expected to see here at all
:) The atmosphere, the people and their projects, the light effects and
the venue are simply wow. The venue is an ex military airport turned into
an open air museum and now hosting the Chaos Communication Camp 2007 with
2000 participants coming from ma
ny countries and backgrounds and involved in a diversity of stuff.
* The Debian gathering currently is more private camping than a open booth,
though we have a huge tent to use, we have not really done so so far:
today it was more important to get a decent sun shade for where our
private tents are and relaxing and socialising...
* The above I wrote at the end of the first night and then yesterday I was
busy setting up the Debian village or corner in one of the huge Freifunk
tents and getting some backlog done. Now we are having some table space
(and some unused sofa space) next to the openWRT and the GnuRadio project,
which gives lots of opportunities for interesting discussions, plus there
are some workshops (mostly soldering) taking place in this tent as well.
* And now I'll go out to go to buy some tickets for a round flight above
the camp :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 10 Aug 2007 15:56:06 +0200
blogging (1-117) life; title=blog recycling
* [1 This] makes me smile.
* And even the DM GR makes me smile, as I hope it will pass :-) [2 Stefano]
summarized nicely why I think DMs are a good thing.
* And "as usual" [3 Joey] came up with a new interesting thought: <i> The
interesting thing to consider is, if this vote fails, how can the bug be
fixed without another vote?</i>
[1] http://bjorn.haxx.se/debian/testing.pl?package=fai-kernels
[2] http://www.bononia.it/~zack/blog//posts/2007/07/me_on_DM.html
[3] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/voting_on_sponsorship/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 27 Jul 2007 10:44:11 +0200
blogging (1-116) life; title=Tuareg...
* Half a year ago Tolimar [1 blogged about a book] called Tuareg, which
sounded very interesting, so I asked him to lend it to me, which he
did in Edinburgh. Last night, I decided to read a bit, to calm down
before going to sleep. At 5am I had finished the book... :) And I
must say, I really really liked it, including those two last chapters
Tolimar didnt like :) Not exactly a happy end, but IMO a very good end.
Recommended to read.
[1] http://blog.schmehl.info/Debian/book-review-tuareg
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:51:33 +0200
blogging (1-115) life; title=nuclear power is safe and pigs can fly
* Hamburg is surrounded by four nuclear power plants, and two of those were
partly on fire two weeks ago. So far, so bad. Now a list from 2001
is [1 becoming public] which describes on 50000 pages (no joke) the
problems in one of the four. I guess Debian has less than 50000 known and
open bugs....
* Not to mention that nuclear waste needs to be stored securily for several
ten thousand years and that so far this problem has not been really solved.
* But I guess I don't care either: I guess the problems of war, hunger,
global warming and the fights for oil and clean water and food will become
much more pressing in a much shorter timeframe...
* So enjoy life like there is no tomorrow! But also keep in mind that there
might be a tomorrow or next year, and that you'd still want the earth to
be a nice place to be. And don't tell me I should stop smoking for my
future. If, I should stop it for my present well being.
* Back to virtual reality now...
[1] http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,494850,00.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:32:20 +0200
blogging (1-114) life; title=DebConf7 videos
* Not really any new videos yet, but at least the [1 existing videos] from
DebConf7 are now available in low and high quality.
* I'll keep you informed on the progress on providing the rest and possible
also with information how you can help.
* And I'm running ion3 again, yay! So much faster...
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2007/debconf7/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 2 Jul 2007 17:33:50 +0200
blogging (1-113) life; title=Happy Camper
* [1 ikiwiki] rules my world! Today I switched [2 debian-community.org] and my
personal todo list to ikiwiki, and I must say, I'm impressed and happy.
Just being able to use svn+vim to edit and organize a wiki or more
generally, information, really rocks. Joey, thanks a swarm of fish for
ikiwiki!!
* On a somewhat, very loosly related note, I've decided to give up on gnome
and beryl, and go back to ion2 or maybe 3. Beryl and Gnome are nice and
fancy, and it's good to show others that Debian can be beautiful, but
a.) it's way slower than using ion as window manager. And b.) I'm now
running 2.6.21 and have been using [3 powertop]... ;) Maybe I'll come
back to a typical desktop UI with Lenny.. :)
* And, now you might ask, how is this related? I formerly used [4 Riot] as
Information Organisation Tool, which is written by the same author as ion.
That said, I totally want to run a free fork of ion3 with a proper licence.
* I *heart* debian stable with custom repositories! :)
[1] http://ikiwiki.info
[2] http://debian-community.org
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/powertop
[4] http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/riot/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 30 Jun 2007 23:12:59 +0200
blogging (1-112) life; title=home again
* Incredible but true: from the three cities in three countries I've been in
today, Hamburg is the warmest.
* Managed to "read" half of my 11000 mails backlog today during the journey,
yay!
* Unpacked all the tech stuff on my bed and managed to do laundry already,
yay yay!
* Found a nice green surprise on my Desktop at home, when I came back. Yay
to more tech toys ;-)
* Missing DebConf again and already! Thanks to everyone who made it a great
experience, I'm looking forward to DebConf8 already :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 25 Jun 2007 19:55:58 +0200
blogging (1-111) life; title=two weeks in Edinburgh
* Today it's been two weeks since I've landed in Edinburgh. On my trip I
starting writing a blog post which since then I haven't had time to
finish. By now my workload has become a lot less, but it's still to high
to finish that post, which is mostly about my involvement in OLPC, if I
remember correctly :-)
* I'll stop here now and finish that post later, so I can do some videoteam
and non-videoteam stuff, like preparing my talk about debian-comunity.org
and having fun and chats with other people. And creating another loldebian
blog post, which obviously has very high priority ;-)
* There is no rain in Edinburgh. Except maybe yesterday.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:41:47 +0200
blogging (1-110) life; title=linuxtag was harmless fun
* I wrote this 15h ago:
* It's midnight, the sun is shining, below me are beautiful montains, partly
covered in snow. In less than 48h I will be home again.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 2 Jun 2007 15:14:41 +0200
blogging (1-109) life; title=towel day
* Today is [1 towel day] and after quite some real sunny days this morning
it's raining and lightning and thunder... I think I like a purely symbolic
towel day better ;-)
* Don't leave home without it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towel_Day
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 25 May 2007 10:49:55 +0200
blogging (1-108) life; title=freedom is like health
* You will probably only see its real value and scope, when you have lost
it already.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 22 May 2007 13:51:09 +0200
blogging (1-107) life; title=mmmm i love unix and debian
* Converting all filenames from latin1 filenames to utf8? apt-cache search
tree utf ; sudo apt-get install convmv ; man convmv ; convmv -f latin1
-t utf-8 -r $path
* Add --notest for full flavor :)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 16 May 2007 15:29:30 +0200
blogging (1-106) life; title=all numbers can be 0wned
* By clicking on [1 this link] you possible violate the DMCA again, it
contains yet another 0wned number. But it also has instructions how
to make up your own 128 bit number, which noone else can legally use
anymore - in countries where the DMCA is valid or can be enforced.
So, better don't click ;-) Or much rather, better do.
* If I were bored, I would probably play with the [2 vanity gpg key]
generator, to generate a very special gpg key, but I'm not bored :)
Also it's not quite so much fun, to start a script and wait.
[1] http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/07/howto_own_a_128bit_n.html
[2] http://www.ccc.de/congress/2004/fahrplan/event/131.de.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 8 May 2007 14:03:49 +0200
blogging (1-105) life; title=another video and more licence joy
* [1 Sam] blogged about a talk he gave about the Debian project, which is
available as a video (in french) too. Since I believe
meetings-archive.debian.net should collect all (more or less relevant)
videos about Debian, I [2 copied it overthere] to preserve it for teh future.
* And once again, the licence fun strikes. Neither the video nor the slides
are accompanied with one. I have good faith that they are licenced freely,
but I'd like to know for sure...
[1] http://sam.zoy.org/blog/2007-05-07-bits-from-the-dpl-blog-talks-ftp-master
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2007/etch-install-party-carrefour-du-numerique/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 7 May 2007 12:17:38 +0200
blogging (1-104) life; title=more uploads and less manual configuration
* Yesterday I did my first uploads of my own packages to Debian! Yay :)
Though nothing spectacular: fai-kernels to unstable, build against 2.6.20
and fixing a wishlist bug for adding a driver with is in the normal
kernels and fai-kernels to stable-proposed-updates fixing the same
wishlist bug.
* Then I decided to do a full backup over night and reinstall my laptop with
FAI in the morning, to see if all my (systems) configuration is now done
correctly and automatically. Well, now it is :-) And as I kept my
home-dir, everything looks (and is) the same as yesterday. Yay!
* With one exception: I threw editing files for network configuration on my
laptop away and switched to network-manager(-gnome). After reading
/usr/share/doc/network-manager/README.Debian I added myself to the netdev
group (I hope this is done automatically if doing a desktop install with
d-i) and now it works very nicely, also with WPA :)
* Right, since two and a half weeks I switched away from ion3. To gnome :)
So far I like it, but let's see what I run in half a year...
* Now I hope I'll get that real cheap (oldie but goldie) ISDN mobile phone
on ebay, so I can have some fun with asterisk soonish. I'm getting this
new ISDN phone so that I can keep my old landline setup intact - for the
time when I set up asterisk and after that.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:13:00 +0200
blogging (1-103) life; title=etch live-CDs available
* Actually I have nothing to do with it, I just thought I announce them here
as I haven't seen them announced anywhere. I have tried the Gnome desktop
one today and it worked nicely, there are also images with KDE and Xfce
available on [1 live.debian.net].
* So I guess I'll carry three media around with me in future: the
multiarch-DVD and CD (as nicely described by [2 Joey Hess]) and an i386
live-CD - unfortunatly live CDs for other archs are not available yet.
[1] http://live.debian.net/etch-builds/
[2] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/tour_of_the_Debian_4.0_CDs/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 20 Apr 2007 21:31:56 +0200
blogging (1-102) life; title=xp and office for 3$
* The company which latest real innovation was Clippy [1 plans] to give away
their flagship products in certain parts of the world for 3$ now. I would
not be surprised if their shares are worth less than that by 2015 :-)
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6571139.stm
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 20 Apr 2007 09:37:03 +0200
blogging (1-101) life; title=first uploads
* I've just done my first uploads to a debian.org machine, even if that
"only" were powerpc builds of clamav for volatile etch and sarge, yay!
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:48:29 +0200
blogging (1-100) life; title=Singing not whining
* Even though the network at dudesconf worked flawlessly even for me after
whining here about my laptop on saturday, I have now resolved to
concentrate on positive aspects here, as I believe Debian as much as
everybody else needs positive thinking rather than negative thoughts.
* Dudesconf/DebConf.es3 rocked, though two days is a bit too short :) Caring
organizers, almost 24h food supply, vegetarian food for the needy, meeting
"old faces" again, being able to attach new faces to old nicks/names and
meeting new people. And doing some juggling once again for more than two
minutes.
* On another positive aspect, the new server for debian-community.org is now
up and running etch with a 2.4.27 kernel from sarge (because of [1 317258]),
the content will be migrated either tonite after work (I doubt
it) or mañana. Seperate post still pending...
* [2 Bastian], I completly agree. Is any artist reading this and able to
dedicate some time and effort to create (a) proposal(s) for a better
design for wiki.debian.org? I believe the proper place to propose designs
and discuss them is the debian-www list, though any place is fine for
posting proposals.
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/317258
[2] http://blog.venthur.de/2007/04/15/since-more-and-more-people-are-referencing-to-wikidebianorg/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:15:25 +0200
blogging (1-99) life; title=let the beer flow at least
* Frustration and (missing) flow blew my mind away in the last hours. I
didn't count them properly, but I would guess I had more than 20 network
connection losses today. And in at least 75% of them I was working online
or in the middle of an irc conversation.
* Then I switched to wired networking and after 5min I had another network
crash. Ten minutes later my laptop froze completly when loading planet.
* So I switched to a beer flow. I'm uneasy to commit to drink a beer for
each network loss, but this is how I feel at the moment.
* Besides these little annoyances, dudesconf is pretty and pretty well
organized, thanks and kudos to the team making this possible and taking
care of many little details. You rock! I haven't heard anybody else
complain about the network so I guess it's my lovely hardware - which is
running etch, reinstalled this wednesday, so I don't blame the software
except some drivers for not properly (as in open) documented hardware.
* I'm looking forward to next year when I can easily justify buying a new
laptop to myself.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 14 Apr 2007 19:06:18 +0200
blogging (1-98) life; title=I hope at least it's sunny in Brussels too
* While taking a coffee break while driving to Dudesconf in A Coruna today,
I saw Hamburg in the news on spanish TV. It seems the weather in Hamburg
is so good currently, that it's newsworthy on spanish TV :-)
* As long as it doesnt rain too much, I dont care about the weather...
And currently I'm happy to sit here in a gym with around 20 Debian geeks,
and look forward to get some Debian stuff done on the weekend...
debian-community.org really deserves some attention, but I won't be
surprised if dont find time the next 36h.
* For those who wonder: Dudesconf really is DebConf.es3 - I have no idea why
it's not called like this.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 14 Apr 2007 02:25:49 +0200
blogging (1-97) life; title=joy and pain
* My plan for coming home yesterday evening was simple: go to init 1 on my
laptop and do a full backup while I sleep, followed by a reinstall with
fai in the morning. That part of the plan worked pretty well: after less
than then an hour of work, aeh, actually waiting and having breakfast, my
laptop is 100% setup as it was yesterday, running shiny beryl on etch and
all the configuration is the same as it was yesterday. Yay! Looks, feels
and is the same system, but the installation is 60min old. So much for the
joy.
* The pain also started when I came home yesterday: the datacenter where my
server is hosted had a huge power outtage yesterday evening and this
morning there were and currently still are some hundred customers getting
their machines up again. I wonder what exactly happend to turn off the
power for a whole datacenter (they have megawatt sized diesel generators
for power backup) but at least I'm happy it's not a hardware failure on my
server. And while my server and services is up again since more than an
hour, www.aol.de, which is also hosted there, is still down ;-)
<b>Update:</b> The power was only gone for 40min, the rest of outtage is
still a bit of a mystery to me: outgoing connections worked fine, incoming
not at all. So I'm not really convinced that it wasn't coincidence that
the reboot fixed my server...
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:04:10 +0200
blogging (1-96) life; title=modern life told in pictures
* Absolutly [1 amazing pictures]!
[1] http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 6 Apr 2007 12:16:56 +0200
blogging (1-95) life; title=my first act as a DD
* I just voted :) Dunno yet if that worked, but if not, I'll manage... as
I'm pretty tired I decided to vote one plattform, not person, the same as
NOTA (as I really think those ideas won't do Debian any good, quite the
contrary). Maybe I'll change that in a few days, dunno yet.
* Due to being quite busy with work the last days or rather weeks, this was
my first act as a DD, which I couldn't do before. I'm still using my
guest-alioth account and due to the freeze (yay!) no uploads yet.
* Quite to the contrary (not really, but I find it very ironic) I've build
my first rpm yesterday :-) I ported fai to fedora... more on this soon.
* Since a week ago debian-community.org runs on its own server, currently
managed by three admins with fai. The webpage is still static html, but
ikiwiki should be up on the weekend, in some free minutes I already looked
into it and played with it on the new machine. I'll write a more detailed
blog entry about this when it's ready.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 27 Mar 2007 08:23:42 +0200
blogging (1-94) life; title=little details again
* [1 Marc], fwiw imo LCD-displays and RAM-memory are much more fun :-) ymmv.
[1] http://blog.zugschlus.de/archives/526-About-Acronyms-and-non-Acronyms.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:00:38 +0100
blogging (1-93) life; title=Please think of the animals formerly known as kittens
* [1 Pretty please]!
[1] http://developer.mozilla.org/wiki-images/en/e/e0/Moz_ffx_openStandards_1024x768.jpg
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:15:58 +0100
blogging (1-92) life; title=Monthy Python 2.0
* I believe this [1 website] is a new venture from Monthy Python. It's
completly hillarious. Don't miss "baby got bible", "the atheist",
basically all videos from "SoldierInGodsArmy" and countless other
gems.
* I'm also amused thinking about the job of the editors. I'm sure they
have a hard time, sorting out which videos are tagged "feature this"
for fun rather than seriously and similar with the "inapproriate" tagged
ones. And watching the videos doesn't really help them :-)
* Claimer: obviously, if religion wouldn't have killed and destroyed
so many lives (and still is), this would be even more funny. And I would
make less fun about religious people like those. Amen.
* And if you believe that there is one god or one goddess or seven or 23,
fine with me. I think [2 we are just a bunch of monkeys] anyway.
[1] http://godtube.com/
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a15KgyXBX24
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:03:50 +0100
blogging (1-91) life; title=Now I understand...
* So [1 Jeff] went vegan, so that he can drive a nice, small & [2 shiny car]
with good conscience ;-)
* More seriously, I don't think that even with Smarts it's possible to be
ecological if everybody drives ones own car.
[1] http://jbailey.livejournal.com/33311.html
[2] http://www.hummer-h1.ch/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:21:27 +0100
blogging (1-90) life; title=Dellbian
* Vote for [1 Debian] GNU/other! ;-)
* In other news, I can vote in Debian now, too :-) And instead of thanking
here all the people who helped and supported me in NM (for which I'm very
thankful, indeed), I'd like to thank all the people who make and made
Debian a great operating system and a fun place "to be". Keep on rocking!
* And [2 Gunnar], congrats to you too! I'm impressed and a bit envious :-)
[1] http://www.dell.com/linuxsurvey
[2] http://www.gwolf.org/index.php?blog/show/215
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:26:18 +0100
blogging (1-89) life; title=finally almost summer
* Today was the first time this year I walked the dog wearing nothing but a
t-shirt - well almost :-) Yay!!! 2nd day with blue sky in a row!!1
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:06:33 +0100
blogging (1-88) life; title=DebConf needs help
* We need to send out invitation letters for people needing a Visa to come
to DebConf. And we really need to do this soon, as a Visa application
process can take months. So it needs to be done real soon now.
* So if you have some spare time (I don't) and care about people coming from
countries needing a Visa to visit UK, please read [1 this thread].
* As I understand it (which might be wrong or inaccurate) the Debian UK or
DebConf Ltd. people want more feedback from UK visa officials outside the
UK. I'm sure there is better information how you can help in this thread,
if not, please ask.
[1] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20070306.200404.86f3007b.en.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:17:42 +0100
blogging (1-87) life; title=secure remote controlled aircrafts
* What a joke. If they are really remote controlled it would mean teh
terrorists don't even have to enter airplanes to do evilfoo, they can hack
and control them remotly. And even if the autopilot is not remote
controlled, but just a local computer in the plane, it can be hacked and
programmed.
* Computers, surveillance and control don't create security. Justice, food
and basic needs do.
* -
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:17:41 +0100
blogging (1-86) life; title=for those who cannot wait
* The low quality theora versions of the [1 videos from the Debian Devroom]
at FOSDEM 2007 are available online now.
* Better quality ones and slides will follow as they appear.
* The encoded videos from the NetConf and the Formal Dependency Management
talks are broken, the DV files look ok, so I expect I will be able to fix
them, but this might take some time.
* Enjoy :-)
* P.S.: Maybe it's worthwhile to go for speaker microphones next year...
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2007/fosdem/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 3 Mar 2007 16:07:49 +0100
blogging (1-85) life; title=FOSDEM videos and d-community.org
* FOSDEM was great! And too short. (But this is maybe a feature.) And too
crowded, which is also a feature. Too tired for more, I am only blogging
anyway, cause I cannot sleep and because I realized I should probably
comment on the videos here, instead of answering many times indiviudally.
* The recording of the videos went fine. I have all 13 talks of the debian
devroom on (unchecked) tapes. Thanks to Herman for the camera, I'll send
your powersupply to you tomorrow.
* A hour of DV needs about 13 GB. So I need to buy a new hard drive. Then I
need to give it to a friend, who'll copy the tapes to disc. Then encoding
and uploading. If all goes well, the videos should be online in a week or
two. Definitly, when they're ready :-)
* The debian-community talk went well, although I was too much in a hurry,
because I had to start late due to the previous talk and having to end
5min early, so pixie could get her (then belated) plan back (with the
camera and awesome tripod). I got quite some good feedback, which already
resulted in a bit further developing of some ideas, which I "documented"
on #debian-community before writing this. More to come.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 27 Feb 2007 01:54:05 +0100
blogging (1-84) life; title=FOSDEM
* Wow! Great and unexpected network at FOSDEM! Yay! At least in the Debian
developer room. The camera is also set up and we recorded the first talk
already :-)
* FOSDEM is organized pretty well this year again and again it's great to
meet so many different people here!
* More "later", but rather after the weekend, I prefer to talk to people
here instead of writing long blog entries... :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 24 Feb 2007 15:38:31 +0100
blogging (1-83) life; title=debian-community.org
* I wanted to write a much longer blogpost about [1 debian-community.org]
before FOSDEM, where I'll have a opportunity to present the idea in some
greater detail anyway. But as we are about to leave from the Debian-Edu
[2 gathering in Soissons], I guess my time will not allow it.
* So I will not waste much time to describe here, what debian-community.org
is about, you can read about most of the ideas on the webpage already
anyway. I have quite some more ideas and concrete plans, which I will
reveal in Brussels and after that on the site itself.
* And for those, who cannot make it to FOSDEM (or just to [3 my presentation],
which is at the end of the schedule) the DebConf videoteam will also
(try to) record the talks in the Debian room at FOSDEM - we'll see if that
will work :-)
* Besides being aware since some time that Debian has developers and users
and (officially) nothing in between, there were two talks at LCA2007
which inspired me to start debian-community.org: the talk by Jono Bacon
about the [4 ubuntu community] and the keynote from Kathy Sierra about
[5 passionate users]. I suggest you watch both, they both are very
insightful. If you are really low on time, I really suggest to find some.
And if you can't, watch Kathy's :-)
* But personally I think both are a must see. They changed my way of
thinking about Debian, the OS, the project and the community. Thanks
Kathy and Jono!
* Oh, last but definitly not least: please join the #irc-channel, the list
(both linked on the website) and get involved. Especially if you want to
help to shape your local(ized) debian community!
[1] http://debian-community.org
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/DevCampFrance2007
[3] http://fosdem.org/2007/schedule/events/debian_community
[4] http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2007/video/talks/173.ogg
[5] http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2007/video/friday/Friday_0900_Sierra.ogg
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:11:54 +0100
blogging (1-82) life; title=OLPC questioned
* Tuesday I gave a talk about debian-edu to members of the [1 Emmaüs]
community, who are - among other activites - refurbishing old computers,
make them usuable again by installing debian-edu and (keep or) send them
to Africa. They looked quite puzzled when I mentioned our cooperation with
[2 OLPC] and what OLPC intends to do: send new computers to developing
countries! I resolved this by saying that I think both approaches are
useful, as this will spread access to technology and knowledge faster ;-)
* While fixing my slides after the talk (which btw are based on the same
talk held at LCA and were now translated to [3 french]) I discovered this
[4 interesting] [5 critisism] to OLPC. After reading them, I still think
both approaches are useful, but recycling should definitly not been
forgotten over this "new toy" :-) TMTOWTDI!
[1] http://www.emmaus-international.org
[2] http://www.laptop.org
[3] http://layer-acht.org/slides/
[4] http://www.fairinternational.org/fi-artikkel_245.nml
[5] http://www.fairinternational.org/fi-artikkel_244.nml
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 22 Feb 2007 15:44:52 +0100
blogging (1-81) life; title=life's too short
* ...so I left some more IRC channels. for now I'll stay on those
mailinglists, but if the unfun continues, I'll stop that too. Ironically
just when I have time for IRC again...
* Have fun!
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 18 Feb 2007 21:23:45 +0100
blogging (1-80) life; title=gone from irc for a while
* I just decided I will leave most IRC channels now, for hopefully not more
than a week. I'm busy with $work$, or rather I need to be more busy with
it, and IRC is too much distracting me, resulting in less work getting done
and being to hectic and harsh on IRC as well.
* You can query me on IRC, but usually I prefer mails. See you in a while...
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 12 Feb 2007 14:26:25 +0100
blogging (1-79) life; title=ARRRRRRgentina!
* Mañana arrrrrrgentina will probably be annouced offically as the location
for DebConf8!
* Kudos to the Venezuelian team for their (almost equally) great bid and very
fair behaviour in the decision meeting! In the end of the meeting when I saw
.ar as the winner (not by much, but enough to be willing to go for it), I
feared a painful end, but no, the opposite happened.
* Thank you all. And now let's make DebConf7 a real fun and productive event
first! :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:29:06 +0100
blogging (1-78) life; title=The world as seldom seen before...
* Browse these [1 maps to see the world] with different eyes.
[1] http://www.worldmapper.org/textindex/text_index.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 2 Feb 2007 14:02:47 +0100
blogging (1-77) life; title=a small rant about the sun or rather the lack of it
* Yesterday it was cold (which is no problem in itself for me) and rainy
(which is!) in Hamburg. Having to go outside various times, my mood went
down during the day, as the rain kept going... late at night my mode got
better, but that's another story :-)
* Today, the sun shone in my face when I woke up, when I went out and up to
now it's still sunny. Yay! Yay yay yay even!!
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 1 Feb 2007 11:43:00 +0100
blogging (1-76) life; title=Chaos Communication Camp 2007
* The [1 CCCamp 2007] will be held from August 8th lasting until August 12th
2007 on an airport museum close to Berlin - you can go there directly by
plane! :)
* If you have no idea what a chaos communication camp is, check out this
[2 video from the camp 2003] - basically its 2000 hackers, camping,
outside, lots of workshops, lectures and crazy - and somehow computer
related - stuff happening, connected to the outside world with a nice
fat uplink - in 2003 it was 155mbps :)
* I don't think a debian booth is appropriate there, but a debian camp
inside the camp would be fun!
[1] http://events.ccc.de/2007/01/24/chaos-communication-camp-2007/
[2] http://chaosradio.ccc.de/media/video/chaos_communication_camp_2003.m4v
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 26 Jan 2007 09:02:58 +0100
blogging (1-75) life; title=Melbourne...
* [1 Andree], it's been announced in the LCA closing ceremony: [2 Melbourne]
will be brilliant! :)
* Currently Melbourne is not so brilliant: I have fever and lay in bed. And
except for the really beautiful botanic garden I have not seen much yet,
and I somewhat doubt I'll see a lot more this time.
[1] http://andreeleidenfrost.blogspot.com/2007/01/linuxconfau-2007-gleanings.html
[2] httP://www.mel8ourne.org
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 25 Jan 2007 10:21:48 +0100
blogging (1-74) life; title=SLUG meeting
* Yesterday I attended the [1 Sydney Linux User Group] january meeting and
gave a talk about the DebConf video-team and the differences in our setups
compared to LCA2007 ([2 slides available] now, video soon).
* It was good to see a bunch of people from LCA again and the 2nd talk about
[3 slack], googles internal maintainance tool which was just freed, was
also quite interesting. For me there was nothing really new, as slack
works quite similar as [4 FAI], the interesting part was to compare them :)
* Unfortunatly I didn't see the report about googles summer of code, as it
was held in parallel. But you can't have icecream with fries :-)
* Fortunatly I also could attend the [5 Sydney linuxchix] meeting before the
SLUG meeting, where a good introduction to Ruby on Rails was given.
* Relocating to Melbourne now - cheers and thanks to everyone in Sydney
contributing to the good times I had here! :-)
[1] http://slug.org.au/node/55
[2] http://layer-acht.org/slides/
[3] http://www.sundell.net/~alan/projects/slack/
[4] http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/fai
[5] http://sydney.linuxchix.org/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 23 Jan 2007 03:35:06 +0100
blogging (1-73) life; title=swimming
* Yesterday we went swimming in Bondi beach in Sydney. While the air was
hot, around 40 degrees, the water was not: only 18! Freakin' cold :-D
* Today it's colder here, barely 30 degrees.
* And now you in the northern hemisphere can all hate me :-)
* More debian/lca/foms related blogging still pending, etoobusy.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 22 Jan 2007 01:08:12 +0100
blogging (1-72) life; title=mmmmmmmmmmmmm
* Thanks. And many more hugs.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:57:51 +0100
blogging (1-71) life; title=not much blogging - just some slides
* It's all about motivation and at the moment I'm not really motivated to
seriously blog about my time at LCA, I'm simply too exhausted.
* My talks about the debian-edu and live-package yesterday went well, it's
just a pity the microphone died during the live-package talk, so that
there won't be a video from it, as video without audio is quite useless :)
* The only useful thing I could think of today, was to start to collect the
[1 slides of all talks] I have been given (and will be giving) in a central
location on my server, so you can easily find them. Currently only the LCA
and FOMS slides are there, I will add the rest, when I'm ready ;-) That's
also when I'll finish my report about the FOMS conference :-/
* I guess I need a nap.
[1] http://layer-acht.org/slides
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 16 Jan 2007 05:00:59 +0100
blogging (1-70) life; title=The trip to planet LCA
* 5 days ago I started my journey to Australia on monday afternoon by going
to Hamburg airport. The security at London Heathrow was disgusting and
silly as expected, but I won't go into much more detail here, just one
thing: the memory of losing my beloved Free Software Foundation pullover
last summer at a security checkpoint at LHR made me kept checking my stuff
all the time, which somehow fitted very well in the paranoia... But I
should also mention the one plus thing in Terminal 4: a nice smoking lounge
with power sockets and comfy chairs. Anyway...
* The flight entertainment system in the 747 was very cool, with lots of
movies and documentaries on demand, so that I didnt bother to read any of
the books I packed nor used my laptop batteries completly, though the
latter was mostly due to the lack of space in the plane and having worked
quite a bit prior to leaving. So I watched four movies to not fall asleep
in the (european) night and get into australian timezone, which worked more
or less quite well. Not sleeping is a good way to switch timezones, but the
side effect is sleepiness, doh!
* Out of those four movies the only one really worth mentioning is "Little
miss sunshine", a really great movie, very funny and quite insightful as
well. See it! On my way back I might even choose to see it again :) I
didn't really understand much of the english in "the black dahlia" but it
was quite interesting to see how smoking once was ubiquitous as the war on
terror is today :)
* The flight itself was not as bad and boring as expected, they even thought
about the poor smokers and made the whole plane get out in Bankgok, only
to enter it again 30min later. Needless to say that it took those 400 people
a bit longer...
* BTW, and in case the famous lazyweb is reading: Kolkata (formerly called
Calcutta) from 10km above really looked like it was swamped, but according
to wikipedia this only happens in summer. Any ideas what I saw / why it
looks liked this?
* When I arrived in Sydney, I was not only welcomed by the sun and summer
(yaaaaaay!!), but also by Sylvia, the (main) [1 FOMS organizer], who was
so very kind to come to the airport at 7.30 AM to pick me up (yaaay!). More
about FOMS in another blog entry very soon to come.
[1] http://www.annodex.org/events/foms2007/Main/HomePage
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 13 Jan 2007 12:27:37 +0100
blogging (1-69) life; title=killergames and hackertools
* Erich, it's not only [1 killergames] which threatens the legal
distribution of linux in germany, but also hackertools like ping, ethereal
or nmap. Check out [2 this article] (german only), which explains the new
law which will come into effect in germany on the 15th of march this year.
* Obviously you need hackertools, to be able to check if you're system is
secure or vulnerable, but unfortunatly common sense is a lost art
nowadays.
* More maybe later, I'm in a hurry, but I at least wanted to make this
remark. More discussion and evaluation of this is definitly needed!
[1] http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/linux/debian/2007011001-csu-macht-debian-illegal
[2] http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/82996
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:35:58 +0100
blogging (1-68) life; title=the previous post
* Maybe I should have made clearer, that the previous post was not debian
related, except for the foms/lca bit.
* As I'm waiting for the overwriting the new disc with random data to finish
anyway, I'll use the time to work on my next, debian related post: my
impressions from [1 23C3].
[1] http://events.ccc.de/2007/01/04/23c3-lecture-videos-forthcoming/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 6 Jan 2007 21:58:58 +0100
blogging (1-67) life; title=always look on the bright side of life...
* And chances are you'll never be forgotten! Thanks for the joy and jolly,
excuse my lack of time today, I'm preparing stuff for my hopefully very
joyful journey to [1 FOMS] and [2 linux.conf.au 2007] :-)
* Enough said for you and me, and now and here, so have hugs and happy days!
/me smiles.
[1] http://www.annodex.org/events/foms2007/
[2] http://lca2007.linux.org.au/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 6 Jan 2007 16:07:17 +0100
blogging (1-66) life; title=happy new year!
* As a start, I just want to quote and link to what Ganneff said last year
already: Thanks, [1 Have a good new year and continue the good work]!
[1] http://ganneff.de/blog/2006/12/27#thanks
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 1 Jan 2007 15:04:42 +0100
blogging (1-65) life; title=Who can you trust?
* Only six days until [1 23C3] basically starts. I'm looking very much
forward to [2 lots of interesting stuff] and much more I guess. (The
schedule is made with Pentabarf which we're also using for [3 DebConf7],
btw.)
* Also this year for the first time there will be a
[4 chaotic debian presence] where we would very much appreciate your help
which will be rewarded with a badge like the one below :-)
* Please [5 leave your name on the wiki page] or tell [6 Mario] or me if you
intend to help and that we should prepare a badge for you :-)
* <img src="http://layer-acht.org/23c3-debian_small.jpg" />
[1] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/
[2] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/Fahrplan/
[3] https://debconf7.debconf.org
[4] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEventsCCCBerlin
[5] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEventsCCCBerlin
[6] http://blog.marioiseli.com/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 20 Dec 2006 21:46:11 +0100
blogging (1-64) life; title=happy customer
* Yesterday I ordered three books at [1 bookzilla.de], they arrived here
less than 36h later. But what I like most is, that they give the full
provision they earn (5% of the price you pay) to the
[2 Free Software Foundation Europe]. It's also nice that shipping in
germany in free.
[1] http://www.bookzilla.org
[2] http://www.germany.fsfeurope.org/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:07:20 +0100
blogging (1-63) life; title=language shapes our behaviour
* If you agree you might understand why I blog about the sign in front of
a restaurant I just passed by. Compare "buffet libre" with "all you can
eat".
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 18 Dec 2006 19:19:48 +0100
blogging (1-62) life; title=no video homework?
* Due to the excellent infrastructure here, four out of five talks are
already online at the [1 usual suspects location], and the fifth talk,
well, has not been held yet :-)
* I expect other formats to be available later today, and then I'll also
come up with better filenames and send a mail to the qa-list.
* Now off for breakfast!
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/qa-meeting-badajoz/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 16 Dec 2006 08:44:20 +0100
blogging (1-61) life; title=the many faces of QA
* The miboot enabled d-i sarge floppies for oldworld powerpc are now
available again, you can find them on [1 layer-acht.org].
When/if :) I become a DD, I'll move them to people.d.o and leave a note on
my webserver...
* Just like [2 last year], the video-team (thanks Cesar, por todo!) will
make the [3 recordings of this years talks] available when they are ready.
I will announce them here and on the -qa list then.
* Besides this, I have been mostly working on debian-edu and enjoying being
in a very nice old town with a bunch of geeks.
[1] http://layer-acht.org/d-i-miboot/
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/qa-meeting-darmstadt/
[3] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/qa-meeting-badajoz/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 15 Dec 2006 12:19:17 +0100
blogging (1-60) life; title=on a second thought
* On my way to the QA meeting in Extremadura today, where I am now using the
hotels wireless, "secured" by very poor obscurity, I thought about my
[1 blog post of earlier today], and I would like to add two things now:
* 16 million ip addresses for continents of 0.5 to 2 billion people per
continent is *really* little,
* ipv6 will give us roughly 667 quadrillion addresses per square millimeter
of the earth's surface - but I believe the digital divide will become
worse. Two words: [2 net neutrality].
[1] http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-59
[2] http://www.savetheinternet.com/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 14 Dec 2006 01:26:37 +0100
blogging (1-59) life; title=virtual reality?
* You probably know this famous cartoon-map, the world according to Ronald
Reagan or the USA. Welcome to the [1 new world order]. Companies are as
big as whole continents. And there is still some room for more companies
or web 3.0.
* I wonder how IPv6 really looks like.
[1] http://xkcd.com/c195.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 13 Dec 2006 13:28:05 +0100
blogging (1-58) life; title=security? get over it
* It seems, that GnuPG has [1 much more problems] then the recently fixed
security hole. The linked post is unfortunatly in german (except for a
quote of some appearantly pretty bad code in gnupg). Fefe (who does code
reviews for a living) points out the following highlights: gnugp2
now includes graphical outputs (why o why), links non-optionally to
libusb and a smartcard-library, and the code size has tripled since
version 1.0. And basically Werner Koch agrees with him: in
[2 the announcement] he writes, that the whole codebase needs a security
review, but they cannot afford to do it. Doh.
* Stefan Esser [3 retired from the PHP Security Response Team]. Until
reading his post I basically believed PHP code basically has so many
problems, because it's so easy to code. Today I just want to thank
[4 Alexander Wirt], [5 Jan Wagner] and Stefan Esser, the author of
suhosin.
* Last but not least, [6 firefox] or [7 iceweasel] also seems to have
[8 problems]. /me hugs dillo but misses its CSS support...
[1] http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=bb8644fb
[2] http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-announce/2006q4/000246.html
[3] http://blog.php-security.org/archives/61-Retired-from-securityphp.net.html
[4] http://packages.debian.org/testing/web/php4-suhosin
[5] http://packages.debian.org/testing/web/php5-suhosin
[6] http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=bb858612
[7] http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=bb858e72
[8] http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=bb859c83
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 10 Dec 2006 19:21:28 +0100
blogging (1-57) life; title=bash KDE or Gnome and support Microsoft
* If you ever said to someone (not deeply involved in free software), you
shouldn't use KDE, it sux, Gnome is much better, or if you said, you
shouldn't use Gnome, it sux, KDE is much better, then please read this
email about [1 hazardous or good arguments about desktop usability]
from Knut Yrvin.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2006/12/msg00015.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 8 Dec 2006 16:34:39 +0100
blogging (1-56) life; title=A true story from the deep internet
* <toresbe> I FOUND IT!!!
* <toresbe> I FOUND THE FIREWIRE CARD! \o/
* <p2-mate> hehe
* <p2-mate> it was somewhere between the cray CPU boards ? :)
* <toresbe> VAX :D
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 8 Dec 2006 11:40:49 +0100
blogging (1-55) life; title=freedom aint a value by itself alone
* i'm working on and advocating software freedoms, yet i wont be happy at
all, if a nuclear bomb would run debian to achieve its goal of killing
millions of people^w^w^w^wprotecting our freedoms.
* i value my freedom to jump into the cold elbe river in winter, but i
probably won't do it.
* and i really dislike it when people stink of too much parfum or of too
much dirt. but i value their freedoms to smell as they want as i value my
freedom (not) to wash myself when i feel like it, or to go away if it
stinks to me (or to stay despite so). and i also value your freedom to go
away or stay and/or tell me when i stink or smell good.
* freedom alone has no value. like money doesn't help if all food is
poisoned or you're in jail. likewise security is worthless without
freedom. and sometimes^walways someones freedom is taking away someone
elses freedom. freedom is a compromise and unlimited freedom can be as bad
or worse than no freedom. the tricky thing is to get dealing with the
limits right and in a free way.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 5 Dec 2006 13:31:57 +0100
blogging (1-54) life; title=tag your packages in no time
* The new [1 web-editor for debtags] is amazing! Very intuitive and easy
to use, I just tagged my packages in less than five minutes :) Try it.
* You'll get quite sensible suggestions for tags and the interface to view
and choose from all existing tags is, well, very intuitive and easy to
use! :) Choose 'view all tags' to get a view on all facets (a la
categories)...
* Try it! :)
* And if you're bored (which I'm not...), there is a nice overview of the
[2 150 most popular packages without tags]. Great work!
[1] http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/edit.html
[2] http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/todo.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 27 Nov 2006 13:12:40 +0100
blogging (1-53) life; title=download free software - patent it - profit
* Today I read that [1 Intel basically completly patented VoIP] as long as
the UI is somehow connected to a personal computer instead of a normal
telephone. What makes this madness even more braindead, is the fact that
[2 the patent was filed two month after the initial release of asterisk], a
free software for VoIP.
* /me goes to patent the wheel and the fork now. Oh wait, I don't have the
money to file a patent right now. Hopefully nobody with money reads this
blog ;-)
[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=7120140
[2] http://www.marko.net/asterisk/archives/9912/0000.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 24 Nov 2006 19:54:46 +0100
blogging (1-52) life; title=so you thought we would be coming to an end soon
* [1 JoeyH], thanks for [2 this link]! Glad to see that there are many many
releases to come :-)
[1] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/DWN_bits_3.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toy_Story_characters
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 22 Nov 2006 01:05:46 +0100
blogging (1-51) life; title=stuff I did today
* Prepared an upload for the new upstream version of tuxmath (two small
bugfixes only), who thankfully got sponsored again and immediatly by
by [1 Kari Pahula] - thanks again! A new upstream maintainer for tuxtype
has also been found, btw & yay!
* Finished setting up [2 failive.debian.net], which in future will
automatically build two fai-cds (currently only one), for fully
automatatic installation of the booted system. To better reflect that
those are not the usual live-cds, the vhost will soon be renamed to
[3 faicd.debian.net]...
* I also want to mention [4 edulive.debian.net] here, though I have done
nothing about it today. This should become a replacement for the current
[5 handmade live-cd], but currently its stalled by ENOTIME and [6 these]
[7 two] RC bugs.
* Speaking of debian-edu, I spent some parts of this afternoon to create
this [8 statuspage for the skolelinux repository] which got me more
familar with dak and which will hopefully help us keeping the archive in a
good state :-)
* Testing d-i RC1 on powerpc newworld was boring: d-i worked flawlessly and
the g-i mini.iso didn't boot. Will reburn and retry, but I don't have
great hopes on that one. The mini.iso from beginning of November worked
nicely though, so it's a minor issue.
[1] http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=kaol%40debian.org
[2] http://failive.debian.net
[3] http://faicd.debian.net
[4] http://edulive.debian.net
[5] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/SkoleLiveCd/Download
[6] http://bugs.debian.org/385950
[7] http://bugs.debian.org/398789
[8] http://developer.skolelinux.no/~holger/archivestatus/needs_love.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 19 Nov 2006 18:23:38 +0100
blogging (1-50) life; title=Solaris GPLed?
* I am amused to imagine what Jörg Schilling thinks about [1 this] :-) More
seriously and less rumor, thanks and kudos to Sun for freeing Java!
But Sun is hardly important for my well being, this is a job for the sun:
* And on a not related note, the sun rises so low now, that it shines onto
the desktop in my room. Yay to the nice effects of winter! Not that there
are that many, but there are some :)
[1] http://open.itworld.com/4914/061113opensolarisgpl/page_1.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 15 Nov 2006 11:21:28 +0100
blogging (1-49) life; title=happy birthday lieber basko!
* Today is the 11th of november, the day that Franzi and I decided almost
ten years ago, would be your birthday ;) I wish you a very happy birthday
and many many more happy days with [1 long] [2 walks], interesting smells
and lots of cakes and bones and all the other things a dog can [3 dream] of!
Next week we'll go on some nice long walks and you'll get another fresh
bone from me. I miss you and look forward to [4 see you] on monday! ;)
<img src="http://www.amayita.com/fotoblog/photos/img_1260.jpg" />
[1] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/450_march_2006/100_1029_Sm.jpg.108.html
[2] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/480_linuxhotel/100_0666_Sm.jpg.50.html
[3] http://www.amayita.com/fotoblog/?image=img_1214
[4] http://www.amayita.com/fotoblog/?image=dscn5817
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 11 Nov 2006 11:11:11 +0100
blogging (1-48) life; title=see you later
* I just left a bunch of debian IRC channels, and only stayed in the
[1 DebConf] ones and some technical ones I'm really interested in. While
I can sadly admit this is related to be being frustrated by the way Debian
has evolved recently, it's only partly because of that.
* IRC is quite a timesink (ironically thats the name of my media server at
home...) and I need to focus a lot more on stuff that brings money, cause
I neglected that too much since I (again) became a freelancer more than two
years ago.
* Last weekend I've tested d-i on powerpc and I have 6 bugs or so to file,
but I could only find the time to file [2 one] bug so far. Luckily the
others are less serious :) (And even more luckily for me I have done my
taxes now, which was the reason I only did the tests but didn't report
them immediatly.)
* I also have three blog posts half prepared, but no time and/or energy
to finish them. One is about my new development toy, an imac, which I use
for testing d-i and debian-edu powerpc. This is nothing really special,
but the nice thing, besides bringing debian-edu to more archs than i386
(please contact me if you are interested in amd64...) about it is my old
friend FAI, which helps me^w^wtakes care that I have to do nothing to get
the machine back into the state I want it after I erased the installation
to test stuff.
* The 2nd one I will actually post later today and about the third one, I
don't know.
* I hope this plan works out and I will also find some time in future to
work on the things in Debian I enjoy and/or find important. But at the
moment unfortunatly doing stuff I don't enjoy is more important, as it
pays the bills... Luckily this is only partly true, two out of three of my
money projects are actually (mostly) fun. Only one is a pain, but it's the
biggest and the most urgent one.
* /me waves, see you later :-)
[1] http://debconf.org
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/397716
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 11 Nov 2006 02:22:48 +0100
blogging (1-47) life; title=IT jobs for men only?
* A [1 nice example] of everyday sexism, I only noticed it when passing by the
third or fourth time.
<img src="http://layer-acht.org/it_jobs_for_men_only.jpg" />
(Note to non-german speaking readers: -in is a female ending)
[1] http://layer-acht.org/it_jobs_for_men_only.jpg
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 1 Nov 2006 16:57:29 +0100
blogging (1-46) life; title=some things always stay the same
* It's nice to know that in this world of constant change, some things
always stay the same: yesterday Microsoft released Internet Exploder 7,
and a few hours later the first vulnerabilities where published.
* Thanks for making me laugh :)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 20 Oct 2006 10:06:28 +0200
blogging (1-45) life; title=Suhosin is getting packaged
* Monday I blogged about [1 Suhosin] and soon after a discussion popped up
on #debian.de about it and two people discovered they were independently
working on it, but haven't filed ITPs yet. They did so now, and I
subscribed to [2 both] [3 bugs], to follow the progress and test the
package(s) once they are ready. So I can happily concentrate on something
else :)
[1] http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=392119
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=392122
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 12 Oct 2006 12:05:31 +0200
blogging (1-44) life; title=If you are not one of us you dont belong here
* Grummel. First Matthew gets driven away out of Debian, now it seems
people want him to leave our planet. What's next, expulsion? :)
Seriously, I also appreciate it, if people involved in debian (mostly)
write about [1 debian related stuff], but I also think that this itself is
likely to make him become less involved. "Pitty", to phrase it mildly.
* Wondering if I should have chosen "mjg59 for dpl" as title of this post...
[1] http://mjg59.livejournal.com/68112.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 11 Oct 2006 10:26:25 +0200
blogging (1-43) life; title=Geek travel
* More than two and a half months ago, [1 Biella lost her power adapter] in
Zuerich airport. The next day, [2 I found it], but couldn't use it as I
don't have american plugs with me.
* But I was really surprised (but prepared) to see it two months later,
on September the 18th! And this time I took a [3 picture] and used it
happily!
<img src="http://layer-acht.org/poweroutlet.jpg" />
* Unfortunatly last thursday, when I was in Zuerich airport again, it was
gone :-( Even more unfortunatly, I'm back home now ;-)
[1] http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/?p=624
[2] http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-29
[3] http://layer-acht.org/poweroutlet.jpg
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 9 Oct 2006 16:17:23 +0200
blogging (1-42) life; title=Suhosin - php hardened
* I wonder if anyone can give me advice on [1 Suhosin] - a quick search did
not reveal many or rather any howtos or debian packages. Did anyone try to
[2 patch Suhosin] into the current debian php4 or 5 packages and succeeded?
Or does (almost) no one care?
* And yes, I will look at it myself. But I just got curious now and have no
time today. Anybody else interested in getting Suhosin apt-gettable?
[1] http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/
[2] http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/download.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 9 Oct 2006 15:15:09 +0200
blogging (1-41) life; title=debconf6 RC1 dvds available for download
* After Ben [1 announced] the source package to build the debconf6 RC1
dvds, I built them and put them online for you to [2 download].
(The spanish ntsc dvd is currently missing but will be there in 3h.)
* Please give feedback about your experiences with hardware dvd players.
* Thanks again to all people who helped making them possible!
[1] http://womble2.livejournal.com/57867.html
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/dvd/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 4 Oct 2006 15:39:56 +0200
blogging (1-40) life; title=and in the darkness bind them
* So according to Peter Lee, an execute from Disney, [1 we have almost won]
against Digital Restriction Management (DRM). Interestingly five out of six
quotes on that page give good arguments against DRM, even though three of
them are from those people who want to restrict our means to share
culture.
* Please spread the word, why [2 DRM is bad]. This website, http://drm.info
was launched today, on the global day against DRM.
* Unfortunatly winning a battle doesn't mean winning the war. (Sorry for the
military metaphor.) So I'm not surprised [3 software patents are back]
on the agenda in Brussels (linked article in german only) and I do expect
the fight against DRM to be a long one.
[1] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Digital_Rights_Management
[2] http://drm.info/fsfe/why
[3] http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/78834
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 3 Oct 2006 16:56:35 +0200
blogging (1-39) life; title=While my keyboard gently beeps
* I intended to write this blog entry yesterday but then I was having too
much fun with [1 live-package], fai, vservers, munin and other more
serious stuff...
* Let's start with a disclaimer: While I still think that encoding encoded
videos in flash is braindead, I sometimes now happily watch those videos,
which I download through [2 some webservice]. I haven't yet bothered to
play with [3 this command-line tool], simply because I need it less than
once a week... But at least I don't need flash in the browser, mplayer
plays the following videos just fine, but xine based players have problems
with the sound, vlc didn't work at all)...
* Anyway, on saturday I was pointed to "[4 white and nerdy]" which is
completly hillarious, for both the lyrics and the video. And you collect
additional geek-bonuspoints by spotting the error in the formula without
the help of the internet! :)
* Also really awesome is "[5 while my guitar gently weeps]" performed with
an ukulele. This song alone is worth dealing with the flash crap. Copy
kills music?? Hahahaha. The music industry kills music. Culture improves
through "copying" and stays alive through copying.
[1] http://live.debian.net
[2] http://javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php
[3] http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/
[4] http://videodownloader.net/get/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fyoutube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D-xEzGIuY7kw
[5] http://videodownloader.net/get/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fyoutube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D2ZnSquv30ac
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 2 Oct 2006 09:00:59 +0200
blogging (1-38) life; title=AAAAAAAAA!
* [1 AAAAAAAAA] (which BTW I also think about the situation in Debian atm),
my blog or rather it's RSS feed is broken. Please read the last post on
[2 my webpage]. Oh, how I wish to have more time. Could anyone please
propose a GR for the 48h day? ;-)
[1] http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/AAAAAAAAA!
[2] http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 25 Sep 2006 18:58:40 +0200
blogging (1-37) life; title=rather say no without reasons than say nothing
* Unfortunatly currently I don't have as much time as I want to, to share
my thoughts about the dunc tank idea. So all I want to say here, is that I
think that dunc tank in its current form does more harm to the release of
etch than good. The same is also (and maybe even more) true for the long
term effects of it, though of course this depends on how dunc tank will
evolve.
* Six more paragraphs deleted as I was not happy about them. (And I also
have a mail sitting in my draft folder since thursday.) But as said, I'm
short on time atm, RL takes it toll. Unfortunatly.
* I just wish the dunc project would not have been announced like it was
announced last monday. (But I have not yet seen a good proposol how "to
turn back time".) At the moment we only lost seven days in the flames.
So we only have 70 days for a timely release. Which I think is an
important target, but not as important as keeping the technical and
"moral" standards Debian is known for. (And harming *those* would really
hurt debian.) I'm sure sure if we would release etch on february 4th 2007,
most people would still be very impressed (20 month!) and say "Well, not
completly on time. But this is debian, it's released when it's ready, and
2 month late is nothing in the software business".
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 25 Sep 2006 18:29:29 +0200
blogging (1-36) life; title=Get ready for DebConf8
* Whatever date and place is choosen, unfortunatly there always will be
people who will not be able to make it... (Though it would help if those
currently complaining about the (currently only estimated) date for
Debconf7 would propose a workable alternative.)
* But, there is always a next time. So, get ready and [1 propose your venue]
for DebConf8!
[1] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20060920.121711.48c71d08.en.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 20 Sep 2006 14:36:34 +0200
blogging (1-35) life; title=limits.conf and vserver
* If you use vservers and logwatch you probably have seen the following
entry many times: "pam_limits[8987]: setrlimit limit #6 to soft=-1,
hard=-1 failed: Operation not permitted; uid=0 euid=0". Or the same with
#8.
* /etc/security/limit.conf describes "*" as the default entry, but it doesn't
say that this default is valid for all users _but_ root. Arg.
* So with vservers this is what you need to add to limits.conf to get rid
of this log enries:
<pre>
* hard memlock 32
* hard nproc 2048
root hard memlock 32
root hard nproc 2048
</pre>
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 9 Sep 2006 13:21:50 +0200
blogging (1-34) life; title=99 messages
* Yay! I only have 99 "unread" mails in total now! I don't think I have been
there (or even below 1000..) neither in this century nor in the last ten
years... sometimes I have been below 1000 unread mails, but below 100...
long time ago. I really want to get down to 5-20 "unread" mails
"constantly", but not today.
* Fetching new mails now ;-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 19 Aug 2006 14:34:54 +0200
blogging (1-33) life; title=oh blogsoftware
* Another "folded" post which was not intended to be folded. Arg. Will need
to fix or replace it someday... :(
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 25 Jul 2006 13:07:04 +0200
blogging (1-32) life; title=oh memory
* I just came back from buying a pack of floppies and a multimedia-card.
The 10 floppies were 3 euros, the mmc 12e, but it also has 40 times the
capacity. Almost twenty years ago (in 1987 or 88) I bought my first pack
of 3.5 inch floppies, for 80 marks, thats 40 euros now, but taking the
inflation etc. into account I would say it's more like 80e nowadays.
Whatever. I surely hope not to buy floppies ever again. But somehow I
doubt it...
* On a related silly note, a month ago I drove 240km to get hold of an
oldworld G3 mac, to test d-i on it. I wiped the machine but kept its name,
laertes, to keep some memories.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 25 Jul 2006 11:26:15 +0200
blogging (1-31) life; title=tuxtype and tuxmath updated
* Finally, after 6 month or so, new updated packages for tuxtype and tuxmath
are available. Due to the much appreciated summer heat, I will not go into
more detail, especially as I already [1 announced] this to the debian-edu
mailinglist. Instead I'm going out in the even more appreciated rain now ;-)
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2006/07/msg00077.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 20 Jul 2006 22:11:50 +0200
blogging (1-30) life; title=debconf6 videos "beta release"
* Two month ago we where in the middle of [1 debconf6]... Yesterday I was
kicked out of my bed by a friendly person delivering 36 DVDs with high
quality recordings of the videos [2 we] took there. Yay! And thanks for
sending those over!
* Also thanks to [3 Ben] many (if not all?!) are already available in lower
qualities in the [4 debian meetings archive.].
* Some encodings, an index with better navigation and the slides are still
missing - (help welcome!) - but I felt I should let you know about the
videos which are available now. (Once everything is ready we will send out
a proper announcement.) Enjoy!
[1] http://debconf6.debconf.org/
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/CREDITS
[3] http://womble2.livejournal.com/
[4] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 19 Jul 2006 14:07:46 +0200
blogging (1-29) life; title=perma adaptor - day two
* [1 The power adaptor] Biella left in Zurich airport on sunday, was still
there yesterday :-)
[1] http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/?p=624
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 18 Jul 2006 12:05:33 +0200
blogging (1-28) life; title=the joys of spam and css
* Unwanted cc:s on debian mailinglists clearly qualifies as "unsolicited bulk
e-mail" for me, aka spam. So from now on I will send personal replies to
those people asking them to stop (because very often people reply to those
emails and keep the cc:s). Also I will keep them in a list of shame. Please,
read your email before sending and include the headers in this reading.
Thanks.
* In completly unrelated news yesterday I finally (after nine month) fixed
the layout of this blog, so you can sensibly read it with a webbrowser as
well. Yay!
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 15 Jul 2006 17:56:55 +0200
blogging (1-27) life; title=three short stories from debconf6
* Unsurprisingly lots of stuff has happened in the last 13 days since I last
blogged. So much, that there were days where I wrote more emails than I
read - and I haven't wrote many...
* Also not unsurprisingly, debconf6 has been/is really a lot of fun - despite
all the problems we have and had. Having met lots of nice people again
(and some for the first time) will be the joyful memories I take home. I
have hoped to be able to do (a little) more debian (not debconf) work, but
well.. it is, as it is. We can and will learn for next years.
* Also I really want to thank all those many people who gave their hands
and/or brains and help get and keep debconf6 running. Muchas gracias!
* Now my three short stories: on tuesday someone on IRC said "AAAARRRRGGG
fucking stream!" and I replied "i'm happy about (bad) status reports, but
'ARRRGG fucking stream' makes me wanna say "streams are optional. STFU!"
which then lead to "well, I didn't mean it that harsh. the streams are
actually pretty cool. just too bad that the connectivity seesm to be to
bad. I'm actually pretty impressed by video and sound quality."
I can understand that people at home get frustrated by interrupted
streams, but we've allways said streams are optional, we do it for the
first time and we had a hell more of problems than we thought off. And
screaming on IRC (over and over) doesn't really make me wanna work harder.
* This morning, some of the power plugs in the main auditorium didn't work.
We then went to the fuse box and everything looked ok. Well, it took us
some time to find out, that this main fuse box had not all fuses for the
big room, there is another fuse box in the audio booth with has fuses for
some (5%) of the power plugs in the main room in the tower. Arg. (Oh, and
in case you wonder, yes, we have asked the hotel staff about this. They
couldn't help.) So one switch of the fuses has moved a little and turned
off. Arrrg. Now it's duct taped and should work till the end of the
conference. Hopefully.
* Story number three is my favorite: someone wanted to have wired access in
the tower so plugged a cable into the hub which goes to the network panel
which link to the network jacks under the table. The small switch we use
has 8 ports and 9 jacks, one extra uplink jack. This broke one out of two
APs in the tower and unfortunatly it was the 802.11g AP to which more
clients can connect. Yay. So far so bad. Then I duct taped the entrance to
the little server room in the audio booth (picture will be uploaded..) and
put up a sign saying noone should enter without coordinated with me.
(BTW, then of course the AP needed some more power cycling to come back to
life, but that's still not the whole story.)
The whole story is that after I duct taped that room completly some
idiot(s) again plugged cables into the switch to get the net working for
him or herself - of course without checking with the videoteam. Thank you
very much! As I we didnt have enough issues already. Luckily this didn't
cause new problems but I'm still shaking my head.
* So, to summarize and to make it clear, I'm not frustrated, just stressed
out, so much that I couldn't even stand people asking me to jump into the
pool after lunch. It was just another request to me and I wanted to
decide for myself what I do in my break. Finally I jumped into the water
and was happy again :-)
* Leaving to formal dinner now without reading this blog post before
sending. Enjoy the food!
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 18 May 2006 17:58:27 -0500
blogging (1-26) life; title=some progress and APs wanted
* the network in Oaxtepec is progressing slowly, we miht have an uplink
tonite or tomorrow... but we'll need more APs, so if you have one, please
bring it along and contact debconf-infrastructure@l.debconf.o - thanks.
* My blog is somewhat broken, I know and I'm sorry, but I cannot help it
atm.
* It's hot here. Really. At 2am it's still warm. Rain might change this
though.
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Fri, 5 May 2006 22:13:06 +0200
blogging (1-25) life; title=debconf6-video and network notes...
* So Jörg has kindly send a request for streaming servers and we got quite a
number of replies yet. Thanks! But... we're absolutly not there yet, so if
you happen to know icecast and be around during debcamp, please help the
video team. (Because we have other things to prepare as well, but we lack
icecast experience the most...)
Also, if someone could prepare a ffmpeg2theora backport from sid to sarge,
this would also help a lot. Actually, it's libavformat-dev (from sid)
which doesnt compile in a sarge environment.
* I brought a debian mirror (plus non-free, contrib, security and volatile)
for i386 and powerpc, co
vering i386, powerpc and sources. If you have an amd64 mirror, please
bring it along.
* I'll stop blogging now and go to actually see Oaxtepec... See you there or
un otra vez :-p
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 4 May 2006 09:57:47 -0500
blogging (1-24) life is good; title=first post!
* /me dances happily and waves from Mexico! Going to dinner now with Gunnar,
Nadezhda, Damog and Sam, then sleeeeeeeeep and then off to Oaxtepec :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 3 May 2006 22:30:19 -0500
blogging (1-23) life is good; title=FOSDEM video DVD with debian talks available
* A [1 prelimnary video DVD] with all talks from the debian developers room
at this years FOSDEM is now available for download. It's called preliminary
because in the final version I would like to include the two missing
talks... (see "extras" on the DVD) - as usual, I happy about feedback!
* For those who care, the script <i>make_pal_dvd.sh</i> is what I've used
to create the DVD.
* On a related note, while uploading the iso I realized that my provider
silently upgraded my dsl line to 50% more bandwidth, yay!!
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/fosdem/dvd/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 1 May 2006 13:56:01 +0200
blogging (1-22) life is good; title=Yay!
* The day before yesterday, it was the first warm day of the year here, for
the first time going out in a t-shirt was an option. But yesterday, it was
raining cats and dogs again and I was really annoyed (even in retrospect)
by those who complained about the good weather the day before.
* Today I woke up, the sun shone in my face and it was even warm enough to
go out in a t-shirt in the morning! Yayyay! And in seven days I'll be
waking up in Mexico City, yay yay yay!!!
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 27 Apr 2006 10:50:34 +0200
blogging (1-21) life; title=all FOSDEM videos online
* [1 Videos from FOSDEM] are now available for download in four different
encodings and qualities. Enjoy!
* Thanks to [2 Wolfgang Lonien] who pointed me to some nice FOSDEM pictures
which I will use for creating a DVD. It will be released, when... ;-)
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/fosdem/ogg_theora/384x288/
[2] http://wolfgang.lonien.de/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 5 Apr 2006 12:16:38 +0200
blogging (1-20) life; title=FOSDEM video dvd - pics wanted
* To create a nice video DVD from the debian developers room talks I'm
looking for suitable photos as backgrounds for the DVD menus. If you know
of nice FOSDEM group/debian/whatever pictures, please point them to me.
Thanks!
* stupid noentry to workaround a bug in ConveyorBelt
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 3 Apr 2006 10:10:47 +0200
blogging (1-19) life; title=moving and a nice work meeting
* March has been a pretty busy month for me, with much less debian work than
usual. As you can see in [1 these photos] it also has been exceptionally
much snow in Hamburg...
* Two weeks ago I started moving within the flat into my new [2 quiet and sunny room]
yay! One day later I lost net access at home, also because of moving :(
Luckily I only had to wait twelve days to get back online. I spent most of
them renovating, moving and reorganzing stuff and then was too tired in
the evenings, when I went online at friends, to do much useful stuff.
<img src="http://layer-acht.org/fotos/winter in march and moving/100_1048_pre.jpg"/>
* Right now it's 3.30am, the [3 debian-edu ftpmaster meeting] is almost
over and in an hour we'll leave the house to go to the fish market which
will start at 5am :) <b>Update:</b> it's 7.30 now, we're back, fish market
was very much fun and there are some more fotos online now.
* This week(end) has been pretty much fun and got me back into doing
debian(-edu) work, although at the moment I'm too tired to properly write
this blog entry. Good $timeoftheday!
[1] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/winter%20in%20march%20and%20moving/"
[2] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/winter%20in%20march%20and%20moving/100_1048_Med.jpg.127.html
[3] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/debian-edu-ftpmaster-meeting/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 2 Apr 2006 03:20:47 +0200
blogging (1-18) life; title=videos from the fosdem debian developers room
* Two hours after I blogged about having no camera I got one :-) Being
hit by #350333 I had to reboot another kernel anyway, so I decided to
try a newer one, namely 2.6.16-rc5, to see if that bug is fixed there.
It is, but I got hit by yaird bug #352010 when I installed it. Fun :-)
Especially because Jonas provided a fixed yaird quickly...
* Oh Shock and horror! The videos show ugly artefacts! The grabbed files and
on the cameras lcd, though they disappear on the lcd, when I unplugg
the firewire cable. Strange! p2-mate suggested electrical interference as
the cause and was right. Using different power-outlets for the notebook
and the camera made the artefacts go away. Oh joy!
* To end a long story quickly: [1 Here they are]!
* For yet unknown reasons these ogg theora files play well in vlc, kaffeine,
xine and totem, but not so in (my version of) mplayer.
* Better quality oggs are being encoded and uploaded atm, followed by xvid
files (highest quality) and mpeg2s (for producing a video DVD).
* The forth talk, "The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port" by Aurelien Jarno was
recorded in HDV and will be released soon... Due to circumstances beyond
our control, the video team failed in recording "Women in Free Software:
Findings from FLOSSPOLS"... Luckily an audio recording was made, which
hopefully can be made available once the study quoted by Halla Wallach
is published.
* Currently only four out of ten slides are available. Pointers welcome!
* My other notices about FOSDEM still need to published :-) When (or if?)
I find time...
* And finally, I succeeded in producing my [2 first video DVD], yay! The DVD
contains all videos from the debian-edu/skolelinux gathering in January in
Erkelenz. Since it was made with [3 webdvd], which Ben Hutching wrote
after producing the debconf5 videos, I think I can have reasonable good
confidence that this DVD will also work in most standalone DVD players.
* Now I'll take a break and go out to enjoy the snow landscape in mid march :-)
Even though I'm real busy atm (video was only number three of my current
priorities) it's important to take a break and relax once in a while.
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/fosdem/ogg_theora/384x288/
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debian-edu-erkelenz/dvd/
[3] http://womble.decadentplace.org.uk/software/webdvd/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:08:22 +0100
blogging (1-17) life; title=video details...
* "A single-layer DVD can store 4.7 GB (4.38 GiB, or 4,707,000,000 Bytes)"
(taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD)
* The [1 preliminary DVD.iso-image] made from the videos from Erkelenz is
4870586368 bytes. Oh well, need to encode the mpegs again, with just a
little lower bitrate...
* Do you know about the "--si" option of ls ? Now I do.
* Licences are no fun. See the thread on debian-legal and debconf-video.
Actually, given unlimited time, I think, licence discussions could be fun.
* Out of those five friends which could borrow me a DV camera, two now only
have broken cameras, two are unreachable and the other cam is busy. Oh
well. (I need a camera to grab those FOSDEM videos lying on my desk.)
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debian-edu-erkelenz/dvd/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 9 Mar 2006 13:02:38 +0100
blogging (1-16) life; title=after victory is before victory
* Well, the title might be a little too optimistic, s/victory/battle/ if you
prefer. Surely the next battle against software patents (not only) in Europe
is coming up.
* In case you haven't heard about it yet, visit the
[1 nosoftwarepatents-awards]. Each month five (software) patents will be
presented, which were issued despite the law prohibiting software
patents and despite (formal) protests against them.
This month features such highlights as a "centralized database" and a
"context menu".
The idea is to show, that a.) software patents exists (despite patent
advocators claiming they don't) and b.) what a sheer nonsense such are.
* BTW, [2 your webshop is also patented], in case you didn't know. Selling over
the network, paying with credit cards, sending offers after requests ? All
patented. Shut down your business now ;-)
[1] http://www.nosoftwarepatents-award.com
[2] http://webshop.ffii.de/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 2 Mar 2006 13:50:19 +0100
blogging (1-15) life; title=old meetings-archive stuff first...
* Finally, all the [1 mpeg2 videos from Erkelenz] fit on a single
single-sided dvd! Once the DVD is actually done, I'll inform you here
(and on the debian-edu mailninglist).
* No news on the fosdem videos yet. Currently I'm looking for a DV cam to
borrow, so I can copy the tapes to hard drive... nonetheless I expect the
encoded videos to be online before the DPL voting period starts...
Oh, FOSDEM was a lot of fun, many thanks to everybody who contributed to it
:-) My own report is somewhat pending - damn work and additionally I
catched a little cold also.
* Joey Schulze informed me today about an english version of his
[2 debian security paper] from [3 Linuxtag 2005].
* The RFC in my blog for a better licence for video works was answered with
two suggestions: MJ Ray suggested a specially reworded
[4 Creative Commons licence], while some folks from the #debian.de
channels were in favor of the [5 artistic licence]. I'm somewhat in favor
of the artistic licence, too, as I think it's easier to understand than a
special edition of a CC licence.
Another suggestion was not to embed the name of the licence in the video
files, but the URL for the licence choosen. Beginning with the FOSDEM
videos I'll do that.
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debian-edu-erkelenz/mpeg/
[2] http://www.infodrom.org/~joey/Vortraege/2005-06-23/
[3] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/linuxtag-karlsruhe/debianday/
[4] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/scotland/
[5] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license.php
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 2 Mar 2006 13:23:12 +0100
blogging (1-14) life; title=licence stuff and 2nd release of the debian-edu videos from Erkelenz
* The [1 videos] from the Skolelinux meeting in Erkelenz have been updated,
you'll find the old and new script I've used for encoding there as well.
The most important changes are: no low quality mpegs anymore, only ogg
theoras, this time in mono also. Better quality mpeg2 videos to be used
for a DVD, though I fear a little bit that I have to redo them, as they
are 4.9GB in total, which might just be a little too big to fit on one
DVD.
Maybe you want to give [2 webdvd] a try (which has just been updated by
Ben) and report back the results ?
* For the first time the videos themselves contain a copyright and author
note. From FOSDEM on I would like to switch to the [3 open content licence]
- please speak up now, if you think that's unwise or unreasonable.
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debian-edu-erkelenz/
[2] http://womble.decadentplace.org.uk/software/webdvd/
[3] http://opencontent.org/opl.shtml
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 22 Feb 2006 11:33:29 +0100
blogging (1-13) life; title=lost slides and videos on meetings-archive.d.n
* [1 Philipp], Joeys "slides" are published on [2 meetings-archive.debian.net]
and I now have informed Wolfgang that he can update his page. Unfortunatly
Joey's paper is written in german...
* Also the round of introductions from the [3 QA meeting] in Darmstadt is
now online (because of rsync-times you'll only be able to see it in three
hours). I did not publish it earlier, because someone said something which
should remain private. Instead of saying this in advance, so that the
recording could have been stopped, this remark was made after saying these
things, and therefore required post-processing.
Then it took me three months until I finally looked at that video to edit
it. What I saw made me speechless (and smile), the video was already
edited! But as nobody told me that, I didn't know :-) Or maybe I was told
this when leaving Darmstadt, but it didn't reach my memory...
Now, about four weeks later, I got over my embarrassment not looking at
it earlier...
[1] http://blog.philkern.de/archives/131-Stable-security-updates.html
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/linuxtag-karlsruhe/debianday/
[3] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/qa-meeting-darmstadt/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 17 Feb 2006 15:55:38 +0100
blogging (1-12) life; title=Videos of DebianEdu meetings and others
* [1 Videos from the Skolelinux meeting in Erkelenz] last weekend are now
available for your viewing pleasure in four different qualities in three
codecs. Now playing: [2 The final countdown] - Enjoy :-)
* [3 The exact script I used to create them] from the raw dv files (one was
hdv) will be available at the same place as the videos in a few hours. I
would be happy to hear comments on the tools and options I've used. Of
course other feedback is welcome too!
* If there are suggestions for improvements, the files will change again. So
before mirroring everything you should probably wait a month or two. I do
not expect any later changes :-)
* Almost all slides are missing at the moment, if you gave a talk and used
slides, please mail them together with source and a suitable licence file
to me.
* And again: Thanks to our hosts from the [4 Cornelius Burgh Gymnasium]!
You've done a great job! Also many thanks to those of you who operated the
camera! Knowing this works so well, I've now decided to do videos of the
talks in the [5 debian developers room at FOSDEM] as well... again, this
will only be possible with your support!
* "BTW", if you're into live streaming, and would like to see live streams
of debconf6, get in contact *NOW*. What we lack at most, is someone who
knows an easy to setup solution, which works with dv input streams, encodes
them and pipes them into some external streaming server. We'll only have
a small uplink in Mexico, so we need to distribute them from another
machine (which we have). What we also don't have, is time to research such
a setup ourselves. If you want to help, please join #debconf-video on
freenode or send a mail to the [6 debconf video mailinglist].
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debian-edu-erkelenz
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2006/02/msg00026.html
[3] http://layer-acht.org/encode_all.sh
[4] http://www.cbg-erkelenz.de/
[5] http://www.fosdem.org/2006/index/dev_room_debian
[6] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/mindex/debconf-video%4020060101.000000.00000000.en.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 4 Feb 2006 15:20:57 +0100
blogging (1-11) life; title=Kernel 2.4 for etch or not
* This is a blog entry I wanted to write for about six weeks now, but I
was busy with other stuff. In December 2005 I got curious why 2.4.32
wasn't packaged for Debian and investigated the situation a bit.
There are several reasons why 2.4 is still interesting:
- Kernel 2.6 is still a moving target...
- Some hardware is only supported with 2.4, for example older laptops
which need APM and don't work with ACPI. Also some non-i386 machines.
- According to popcon, 6-7% of the i386 users have a kernel-2.4 image
installed.
* Unfortunatly, nobody from the kernel team is really interested in
working on 2.4 anymore. They do security fixes for the 2.4 kernels
in woody and sarge, for which I'm very thankful, but that's about it.
Even though 2.4 is moving very slowly nowadays (mostly security updates,
very seldom new drivers are including), this is more work than needed,
because every fix needs to be backported to 2.4.27 (and 2.4.18 for woody).
* Of course there are some issues which need to be taken into consideration
when thinking about whether it's worthwhile to have 2.4.3x in Etch:
- it needs gcc-3.3 to compile, gcc-4.0 won't work. Period. So gcc-3.4 also
needs to supported during etch's lifetime - which will be something like
2009 when etch+1 will become oldstable (by current release cycles)...
- it's not sensible to have powerpc and amd64 flavors, and probably
others. So this kernel package will not be arch any. (Which is not
really a problem, but unusual.)
- Both kernel 2.4 and 2.6 contain non-free firmware and drivers. I
seriously doubt people want to deal with this issue and solve it for
2.4. For 2.6 it will be done, but for 2.4 ? As I see it, this is the
biggest showstopper for 2.4 in etch, I would be happy to be proven
wrong. As a starting point, you can look at this [1 investigation]
by Bill Allombert about the the situation in 2.4.25.
Removing those files would be an option, but maybe we can also "borrow a
better solution" from 2.6...?!
- if 2.4.32 or .33 shall be used in d-i/g-i, work on this integration
needs to be started real soon now.
I have done some work on creating a linux-2.4.32 package which is based on
the new kernel packaging. I got busy with videos for debconf-es2, so I
didn't finish and commit this.
Horms made a [2 presentation] about the kernel packaging in debian for LCA
and gave two options: a.) support and backport fixes for 2.4.27 or b.) go
with 2.4.32. Somehow he did not consider the option of dropping 2.4 even
if he calls it legacy ;-)
Besides technical reasons (security fixes handled by upstream, some driver
updates and very few new ones) I think we should not forget that most
people have no idea that 2.4.27 in debian is far closer to 2.4.32 than to
.27, and therefore will think debian ships an outdated 2.4 kernel. So I
think we should simply go for 2.4.3x, if it is sensible to support 2.4 in
etch at all.
It "just" needs to be done, and I volunteer to do it (with the help of the
kernel team, the porters and anybody else who wants to join), if this work
will not be in vain.
Please send comments to the [3 debian-kernel-mailinglist], where I posted
this blog entry before. Thanks.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/04/msg00074.html
[2] http://www.vergenet.net/linux/debian_kernel/
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2006/01/msg00742.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 29 Jan 2006 00:31:50 +0100
blogging (1-10) life; title=splashy backport for sarge
* Since I prefer quiet and relaxing work environments, I don't like to see
the kernel boot messages if I'm not debugging something. So saturday I've
installed [1 splashy] on my laptop.
As I couldn't find backported packages for sarge anywhere, not even on the
[2 skolelinux wiki] (which explains the usage of splashy and is targeted at
sarge (fixed now)) I've built them myself and provide them on [3 my webpage]
to save other people from rebuilding them again and again.
I've asked to include them on backports.org but it's (not yet written)
policy only accepts packages from unstable not from experimental. So no
luck for now.
* For other people's reference I use the following as kernel params for
splashy on a R51 notebook: video=radeonfb:1024x768-32@100 vga=795
[1] http://splashy.alioth.debian.org
[2] http://www.skolelinux.de/wiki/RalfGesellensetter/Splashy
[3] http://layer-acht.org/splashy/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 23 Jan 2006 11:58:34 +0100
blogging (1-9) life; title=On workrave and workplaces
* Thanks to [1 David Pashley] I have discovered [2 workrave], a tool with
the aim to help you prevent RSI. I find it really useful, though in the
beginning it sometimes feels annoying, for example when you're in the middle
of doing something. After two days of using it, I'm slowly changing my habbit
of clicking on the "postpone" button in those cases, as this a.) leads to
another interrupt soon and b.) means even more finger movements (to click
on the button and getting back to work).
Taking the breaks as adviced (I've only changed the defaults slightly)
is really relaxing in my experience and even if I'm in the middle of
doing something, I don't loose my concentration if I pause for 25 seconds
and relax. I do loose more of my concentration if I do use the postpone
or skip button :-)
And it's also not only helping preventing RSI but also back pains (which
are related in my opinion / experience as one of the core causes for RSI
is bad posture which also leads to back pains) and those breaks also help
not to forget to eat and drink, which sometimes happens during hacking
sessions.
So I'm a happy workrave user now, even though I'm still annoyed by
[3 bug 348845] - which I would happily fix myself if the sources for the
images were available...
* Which brings me to the topic of content being unsuitable for "the"
workplace, because it [4 offends people]. I am offended, but not really
surprised, how many people (and workplaces) seem to be offended by
mentioning lesbians, but not for [5 sensible reasons] but because of the
sexual reference. Heck, even [6 Microsofts CEO] seems to happily get
along with gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders even though
Microsoft as an american company has to fear those (christian) talibans,
which is not the case for Debian.
And you really shouldn't blame anybody else except yourself if you visit
non-work related URLs during your working hours.
[1] http://www.davidpashley.com/cgi/pyblosxom.cgi/2006/01/19#unintended-consequences
[2] http://packages.debian.org/stable/gnome/workrave
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/348845
[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/01/msg00975.html
[5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/01/msg00985.html
[6] http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/stories/2005/04/23/steveBallmersEmailAboutAntidiscriminationBill.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 22 Jan 2006 17:25:10 +0100
blogging (1-8) life; title=debconf-es 2 videos available
* The videos from [1 debconf.es 2] are now [2 online] (actually they will be
at 18 UTC). Which is good and makes me happy...
* But there are still some problems, so you should not mirror them (yet):
1. The low quality mpegs are a too big for my taste.
2. The good quality oggs have too low quality.
3. The kde talk is only available encoded with xvid, and nothing else.
Expect high quality xvids of all talks and a mpg/ogg version of the kde
talk soon.
4. I have no idea [3 what this is] - any hints welcome.
5. ATM the slides are "only" available on www.debian.org.es not yet on
meetings-archive.debian.net
* I very much appreciate feedback, esp. on the following topics:
1. During some talks there is quite a lot of zooming, is that good or bad?
2. Due to the camera position, some people in the audience could only be
captured from the back (while they are talking). Is that good or bad ?
3. A better licence for this kind of stuff
4. The filenames: Should they contain a chronological number of the talk ?
Spanish filenames might also be better/nicer, feel free to send me a
translated list ;-)
5. For all talks - except the kde talk - ffmpeg and ffmpeg2theora were used
for encoding. (BTW, anybody knows another theora encoder? ffmpeg2theora is
slllllllow.) For some strange reasons this didn't work for the kde talk,
so I've used mencoder for it. Maybe I should upload the 12GB raw-dv file
of the kde talk as well, so people can debug this ?
* The exact command lines I've used are documented on my [4 video page] -
this page is pretty much work in progress and will be updated as I find
better solutions for the above mentioned problems.
* Debconf-es 2 happened a month ago. When asked back then, I gave today as
the ultimate release day. Then my life has become much busier than expected,
and as a result the videos are in this unfinished state. Do you appreciate them
being released like this today or do you think I should have released them
when they are ready ? (Which might be in two weeks or more as I'm still very
busy. IMO it's good to have them (even in bad quality only (at first))
ASAP.
[1] http://www.debian.org.es/debconf-es2/charlas.html
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/debconf-es-2/
[3] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/debconf-es-2/ogg_theora/720x576/whatsthis.ogg
[4] http://layer-acht.org/video/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 16 Jan 2006 15:25:15 +0100
blogging (1-7) life; title=In case you are running OpenWRT
* In case you are running OpenWRT, specifically [1 White Russian RC4], and
your root password is reset after a reset or a power-cycle (and telnet is
also enabled again), then you need to boot into failsafe-mode, execute
"mtd unlock linux" and "jffs2root --clean" as root and reboot. Maybe this
is useful for someone, at least I couldn't find this info on the web...
[1] http://downloads.openwrt.org/whiterussian/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 16 Jan 2006 14:52:09 +0100
blogging (1-6) life; title=I love statistics
* [1 arrrrrrrgggghhhh] !
[1] http://osteele.com/words/aargh
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 14 Jan 2006 01:00:15 +0100
blogging (1-5) life; title=happy 0x7d6 - some news from 0x7d5
* Gnarf: itentional repost to get the URLs right. Dammit :-]
* 2nd post :) I'm really curious where this will lead to... probably I
should just write more and care less. OTOH, this will be on the net
(somewhere there..) for eternity :)
* my pictures from [1 debconf.es 2] in December 2005 and [2 debconf5] in
July 2005 are finally online. Many thanks to Amaya for creating this fancy
hackergotchi out of them!
* debconf.es 2 videos are now being worked on.
* In the end of december I went to [3 22C3] and had lots of fun and insights
there. For the first time the congress was spawned over four days (instead
of three the years before), which lead to a much more relaxed conference
(no talks before noon and somewhat less crowded schedule), though in the
end it was still too much information to proceed properly ;)
The CCC's conference management system, [4 pentabarf], has been rewritten
from scratch in ruby on rails - and IMO it already rocked when it was
written in PHP. I guess I will have to take a closer look again..
The video team collected 400GB of data on 200 DV tapes. So now they'll have
"some" work to do: only a few talks are already available online, most are
not (more than 100 talks), and all need to be encoded properly. This is
unfortunate for the audience (they'll have to wait) and a lot of work for
the people doing it. For debconf6 we should aim to release as many videos
as possible during the conference. So IMO streaming is purely optional
and should only be done if a.) the video team consists of a sufficient
number of people and b.) we have prepared this really well. You're welcome
to help!
* Oh, I almost forgot: that conference had better connectivity than Africa!
That's 10 GB/s. Which really doesn't say much about the conference - your
ISP might have more - but it does say a lot about the continents and its
peoples situation.
[1] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/debconf.es%202/
[2] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/debconf5%20in%20HEL/
[3] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/wiki/22C3_Public_Wiki
[4] http://pentabarf.org/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 4 Jan 2006 20:04:20 +0100
blogging (1-4) life; title=hola planet
* Hello World. As you can see, my blog is now on planet.d.o as well. /me
waves :)
* I'm writing this during the final minutes of debconf-es-2, which I
enjoyed quite a lot. Thanks to everyone who made this another fun Debian
event! Quite unsurprinsingly, I couldn't get as much done as I thought
previously. What I did manage to do, is to add more stuff to my todo list:
I will be taking home a bunch of DV tapes with the recordings of the [1 talks]
given. I'll send a note, when they're available online.
[1] http://www.debian-es.org/debconf-es2/horarios.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 18 Dec 2005 17:42:23 +0100
blogging (1-3) life; title=about blogging and websites and stuff
* So it has been almost a month since the last time I wrote stuff here.
The burden to write something more or less regulary is one of the
reasons why I'm still not sure if I want to have a blog.
One reason for me to have a blog would be to be able to answer to other
peoples blogs - although I'm not sure if this is a good reason as most
blogs allow comments...
* The website looks better now and I've also improved some content.
Still I'm not really happy about it - but at least I'm not unhappy
about it anymore.
* Next thing I'll do is update the FAI stuff. "Unfortunatly" I got sucked
into playing with [1 asterisk], which took and takes some of my time but
it's also lots of fun and useful to have running.
[1] http://www.asterisk.org
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 4 Nov 2005 14:37:40 +0100
blogging (1-2) life; title=Linuxhotel and gallery available
* I've attended a automatic installation workshop in the [1 Linuxhotel] in
Essen. Even though I suffered from fever it was fun, as we finally set up
a [2 group development process] for [3 FAI], splitted the fai package
into a few more packages and prepared a multi-arch fai kernels package.
* Also I played with [4 bins] a bit and put some [5 photos] of the event
online.
[1] http://www.linuxhotel.de
[2] http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/index.php/Fai_subversion_howto
[3] http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai
[4] http://packages.debian.org/bins
[5] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/linuxhotel
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 9 Oct 2005 14:46:05 +0200
blogging (1-1) life; title=First post
* First post with Romain Francoise's [1 debian changelog blogging software] :-)
[1] http://orebokech.com/debian/#1-1
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 7 Oct 2005 23:29:11 +0200
-- 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 bit ugly,
but hey, it's tab9, I don't care (for the time being).
* Besides those two issues I'm really happy. It's fast, it's slick, it
doesn't get in the way, floating mode rocks, switching between modes
rocks, the default keyboard shortcuts make sense and I use the mouse less
often. Plus the author is a nice fellow. And by now it even got
documentation!
* Oh, another issue: The cat is gone. That's totally unacceptable. Therefore
I propose to fork awesome and bring back the cat and call the fork TWMFKAA ;-)
[1] http://awesome.naquadah.org/roadmap/
[2] http://packages.qa.debian.org/docker
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/network-manager-gnome
[4] http://packages.qa.debian.org/xfce4-panel
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 12 Dec 2007 20:06:55 +0100
blogging (1-142) life; title=not yet awesome enough
* While I'm still running awesome as my window manager currently and though I
do like it, I will switch back to ion on the next login. "Some XRandR
support" is not yet enough... it crashes when I add or remove a screen.
* Besides that, the only other thing missing is that I have not yet found
out how to use <pre>docker</pre> sensibly. Hints welcome.
* So overall: looks very promising, but not yet a feature complete
replacement for me. But good things will come to those who wait :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 9 Dec 2007 10:22:36 +0100
blogging (1-141) life; title=awesome reading
* When I was a kid, I often started to read a book and didn't do anything
until I finished it. This is what I did yesterday until this morning
again... :-) Nowadays I do this rarely, but if it's happens, I have a lot
of fun in a fictional world.
* Now that I finished the book I decided it's a good time to give awesome a
try. And unlike the last time, which was last week in a plane, I now also
have access to the documentation, which makes using it a lot easier :)
* I think I like awesome already, after just five minutes. Even if there are
three things I'm currently missing: runniny arbituary commands with F3,
ssh with F4 and the cute cat on the awesome webpage. I think it's totally
unawesome that it's gone!!!
* And for those wondering what awesome is: it allows me to say "good-bye
ion" :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 8 Dec 2007 15:20:46 +0100
blogging (1-140) life; title=what is going on in Venezuela
* Obviously I don't know, but I guess that [1 this article] is much closer
to the truth than most of the news sites and magazines.
[1] http://www.gregpalast.com/fear-of-chavez-is-fear-of-democracy/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 5 Dec 2007 18:49:02 +0100
blogging (1-139) life; title=five in seven and four in one
* On friday the 16th I blogged that I hoped to manage to upload five package
in the next seven days and I've made it! Yay!
* Ok, for the last upload I cheated, I uploaded it 5 minutes after midnight
UTC, while normally I'm on MET :) The packages I uploaded were: [1 olsrd]
(new upstream release), [2 tuxmath] (new upstream release, I already
blogged about it), [3 tuxtype] (just adding Vcs-pseudo headers),
[4 debian-edu-doc] (made it through NEW already, yay, more in a dedicated
blog post soon) and [5 batmand] (closing ITP #405588, still in NEW. This
package was mostly prepared by Wesley Tsai, thanks and I'm looking forward
to meet you in December :)
* Yesterday I was too busy with RL and with preparing the upcoming
[6 Debian Edu r1 release] to blog about the above and now I'm also not
really in the mood to add more links and information (like how to provide
translations for tuxtype, tuxmath or debian-edu-doc...)
* Because my current mood is: happy and hungry! Very hungry.
* I've spent the morning reviewing the last four packages for the r1 edu
release, accepting them into our etch and sending [7 announcements], which
were eaten by a configuration problem. But the listmasters are aware
of the problem and I'm confident they'll resolve it soon. Otherwise
we can't send the release announcement out, something I'm really looking
forward to finally see happen after four months of work! The only things
left to do now are testing and finishing the release notes and the press
release :)
* Out for lunch!
[1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/olsrd
[2] http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-138
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/tuxtype
[4] http://packages.qa.debian.org/debian-edu-doc
[5] https://www.open-mesh.net/batman
[6] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/roadmap
[7] http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu-announce
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 25 Nov 2007 14:26:28 +0100
blogging (1-138) life; title=shiny and localized tuxmath
* Yesterday I've uploaded a shiny new upstream version of [1 tuxmath].
Besides many bugfixes, new "crystal" icons, hall of fame, a demo mode,
being able to track completed lessons and better configuration options
(you can create your own lessons now), this version also finally supports
localisation. Yay!
* But, as this feature is really new, there are only translations for dutch,
czech, norwegian bokmål and nynorsk available. So if you have a moment to
spare, please consider translating those 84 strings, which are probably
20-30 unique strings, the rest being variations. (Divided by 3, divided by
4, etc...)
* Please file them as [2 wishlist bugs against the package]. Thanks!
[1] http://packages.debian.org/tuxmath
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/tuxmath
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 18 Nov 2007 12:47:51 +0100
blogging (1-137) life; title=first snow
* Inspired by a certain blog/foo post, I want to announce that I've seen my
first snow of this winter last night, too. Not enough to really cover the
ground, but a bit to at least give the impression the ground ist covered.
* I don't mind the cold, as long as it isn't raining. Since two days it's so
cold that the dog isn't muddy after walking him, and that's quite good.
Still I really look forward to be in Spain next friday, and little because
of the weather ;-)
* And I would be really happy if I manage to do five uploads to Debian
within the next seven days, though only three would already make me happy.
And now back to non-Debian work...
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:05:44 +0100
blogging (1-136) life; title=new Debian stickers coming soon
* Some time ago I met Colle from the CCC who told me she could create
Debian stickers like the ones [1 seppy] used to make. And today I saw
the first preview:
<img src="http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/debian-sticker.jpg" />
* If you want one or some, make sure you'll attend [2 24C3] or wait til we
meet the next time :-) Remember: good things...
* Thanks a lot to Colle for dealing with the printing!
[1] http://people.debian.org/~seppy/
[2] http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 7 Nov 2007 19:02:36 +0100
blogging (1-135) life; title=The day the routers die
* [1 I suppose you better give it a try]. Wow.
* Unrelated, there is now [2 planet.it.debian-community.org] for the italian
(speaking) debian community. Yay.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y36fG2Oba0
[2] http://wiki.debian-community.org/planets/it/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:28:24 +0100
blogging (1-134) life; title=Debian contributor planets
* This blog post is long overdue, but mostly due to spending too much time on
Debian Edu (and to little on d-c.org), I haven't got around writing this.
* Since about a month an [1 english] and a [2 german] planet has been set up
as part of [3 debian-community.org] and is waiting for you to add your
feed. Yes, that's right, currently everybody can add any feed. This might
change, if/when this is abused, but currently we're still able to operate
in good faith :-) Just edit the "list of feeds".
* It's also trivial to create planets for other languages, in case you are
interested. Just drop by in #debian-community on OFTC and we'll set it up.
* And now, back to work, so that I can soon blog about some, as I think,
exciting news about Debian Edu.
[1] http://planet.en.debian-community.org/
[2] http://planet.de.debian-community.org/
[3] http://debian-community.org/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:16:08 +0200
blogging (1-133) life; title=Small report from the meeting in Extremadura
* The last five days I've spent at the combined Debian Edu, FAI and CDD
meeting in [1 Mérida] in Extremadura, together with 17 others. The Debian
Edu / Skolelinux crowd was the biggest, followed by FAI, followed by CDD
people, though many were part of more than one project. "As usual" it was
great to meet many known faces and some unknown ones and to be able to
discuss stuff in [2 RL].
* Besides various small different things, I worked on the Debian Edu etch r1
release, our lenny roadmap (see the bottom of our [3 roadmap page] which
also covers etch r1) and the (technical side of the) german translation of
the [4 Debian Edu documentation]. Non edu related the new
[5 setupharddisk2] for FAI took most of my brain activity. And I've signed
all keys allready :-)
* We stayed at a very nice hotel in the even much nicer city of Merida,
which features a lot of roman ruins and history. For example, we walked
over the biggest roman bridge in the world! The only thing that was bigger
was the amount of good food we were forced to eat every day... Incredible.
This was my second visit to Merida and this time I finally managed to
visit the amphitheatre (with seats for 15000 people) and the Roman
theatre. (Unfortunatly the english page about [6 Emerita Augusta] is a
stub.) If you happen to come around that area make sure to spend some time
sight seeing, it is really worth it! People living in Merida literally
fear to rebuild their houses, because as soon as they start to dig, they
find something historical and have to turn their property into a museum
:-)
* In case you have not seen it yet, you should watch this small movie
from euro news about the [7 free software efforts in Extremadura].
Insightful and very good promotion, also to show around.
* Many thanks to César, José Luis and the Junta de Extremdura for hosting
such a great meeting! You rock!
* On a unrelated note, spam has gone crazy yesterday while traveling back,
15000 mails were not catched by my so far well working setup. ARG. I still
used to have a catchall setting, which was useful to give out addresses
like $company@mydomain, but now I will explicitly list those addresses and
disable catchall. And luckily for you I will not blog about every spam
mail I got... :) Generally I dont consider spam (the source of) evil, it's
money: as long as money rules the world, there will be spam. So since it's
a social problem, it is hardly solvable by technology. (That is, as long
as you want to receive mails from strangers, which I do.) IMO what's worse
than spammers are autoresponders to spam. Most of those 15000 mails were
auto-replies to spam. OMFSM.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mérida,_Spain
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Extremadura2007/Schedule
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/roadmap
[4] http://wiki.skolelinux.no/DebianEdu/Documentation/Etch/
[5] http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/index.php/Setup_harddisks_2
[6] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerita_Augusta
[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR8Oh0Js_lA
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 22 Oct 2007 15:27:56 +0200
blogging (1-132) life; title=mediawiki diffs and lazyweb
* Dear lazyplanet, I follow two mediawikis via reading the changes with RSS,
and I cannot really follow them well, as the diffs are not very readable.
For moinmoin wikis this is no issue, there are nice diff mails one can
subscribe to. Does anybody know a way to configure mediawiki, so that it's
possible to read the diffs? Or, an example of such a setup? If you do,
please contact me. Thanks.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 20 Oct 2007 17:15:56 +0200
blogging (1-131) life; title=Pleased
* Unfortunatly I couldn't attend yesterdays DebConf8 meeting, because
fortunatly an old friend of mine whom I haven't seen for almost five years
visited me. So I was very pleased when I came home later that evening and
could easily read the [1 minutes] provided by [2 meetbot]. I love it when
a plan comes together! :-)
[1] http://meetbot.debian.net/meetbot/debconf-team.20071015_1858.html
[2] http://meetbot.debian.net
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 16 Oct 2007 08:35:59 +0200
blogging (1-130) life; title=Home sweet etch
* All machines, virtual or not, at home now run etch. Yay. Actually, /me
powers up a seldom used server to upgrade that one too :-)
* Six more to go and then I'm ready for lenny ;-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 11 Oct 2007 14:31:44 +0200
blogging (1-129) life; title=meetbot to help IRC meetings
* On monday we held our first [1 Debian Edu IRC meeting] with the help of
[2 MeetBot]. MeetBot is just a very simple bot, actually it's a plugin for
[3 eggdrop], which can help with structuring a meeting, publishing logs
and writting the minutes. It's purpose is to help a human to chair a
meeting, not to chair the meeting on it's own. Because except for
publishing the logs it cannot do anything alone :-)
* Currently the bot idles in #debian-edu, #debconf-team and #debian-boot,
drop me a note if you are interested in trying it in another channel.
There's a wishlist and a small howto on it's homepage.
* Have fun (with shorter post-processing of meetings! :)
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Meeting/
[2] http://meetbot.debian.net/
[3] http://packages.debian.org/eggdrop
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:01:04 +0200
blogging (1-128) life; title=For those who think Debian is too picky
* Thanks kaol, [1 this comic] really makes my day! Best viewed in iceweasel
:-D
[1] http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/bonobo-conspiracy/?i=749
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 27 Sep 2007 12:48:38 +0200
blogging (1-127) life; title=Not quite a router
* Aigars, the fonera is a nice box, it justs lacks a second LAN port.
[1 See for yourself] :-)
[1] http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Hardware/Fon/Fonera
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:22:40 +0200
blogging (1-126) life; title=Democracy as you knew it is over
* A new law is being made in germany, which will make consentual sex between
minors a crime, which has to be punished with four years of prison at
least, plus ending up in a sexual offenders database for life. I, for
one, do not welcome our new taliban overlords.
* These [1 two] [2 articles] explain the situation in full detail (in
german).
* In other news, it's 102 days until all electronic communication in germany
(as in the EU) will be logged for half a year. (Until a terrorist attack
happens which was planned for more than half a year...) This includes all
emails sent, the location data of all mobile phones, every webpage visited
and so on. From everybody. If you are in Berlin tomorrow, go [3 demonstrate].
I, for one, do not welcome George Orwells lack of imagination, 1984 looks
really pale today. (But it's still a good read.)
* My next blog post shall take place in teletubby land again and shall
feature smileys as well. Sigh.
[1] http://karlweiss.twoday.net/stories/4148132/
[2] http://karlweiss.twoday.net/stories/4227933/
[3] http://www.freiheitstattangst.de
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:10:38 +0200
blogging (1-125) life; title=fixxx bugs like Joey Hess
* [1 Less than an hour]. Thanks! :-)
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/443213
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 19 Sep 2007 21:08:42 +0200
blogging (1-124) life; title=some simple backports
* [1 Bernd] blogged about the new version of gimp-plugin-registry he
packaged, which includes the cool new [2 GIMP Liquid rescale plug-in]
which I had to try out. It really rocks, though it is much slower than in
that video.
* Anyway, backports for etch are available at "deb http://layer-acht.org/debian etch backports"
Those are simple rebuilds of gimp-plugin-registry and opencv.
* If you replace backports with xorg or xorg-experimental you'll also find
rebuilds of xorg for etch, either from lenny or from experimental. They
are slightly outdated (built two weeks ago) and need to updated against
the newer sources, but they work for me.
[1] http://bzed.de/blog/gimp-plugin-registry_0.3.1-1
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NcIJXTlugc
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 15 Sep 2007 10:05:57 +0200
blogging (1-123) life; title=dancing and singing
* Today I'm dancing and singing. :-)
* In part because I've just uploaded a new version of [1 tuxmath] which IMO
has a great improvement: tuxmath is a math game for children, where the
player has to solve little math computations, otherwise the cities on the
bottom of the screen get destroyed like in space invaders. Which is not
exactly suited very well for little children. So the idea came up, to
instead use igloos, which melt, so that in the end a penguin has to escape
from the igloo when it gets destroyed. Very cute, but still the same
gameplay. And the best thing is, those igloos were painted by a third
grade daughter of one the developers.
[1] http://packages.debian.org/tuxmath
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 3 Sep 2007 10:14:24 +0200
blogging (1-122) life; title=nine days later
* I'm now only down to 55 unread mails, but I'm happy, as I'm now in the
region where those mails mean actual todo stuff.
* And, this weekend I've been mostly offline, having fun at a free festival.
Thus enjoying my second day without internet this year and my first day
without speaking or reading/writing english - though I enjoyed that much
less :-)
* [1 Joey], thanks for your suggestion to turn down the frequency of polling
mails. I'm happily polling every 30 minutes now too, and thinking of going
down to every 60 minutes.
[1] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/inbox_zero/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 28 Aug 2007 16:31:19 +0200
blogging (1-121) life; title=Red Cross sued for using the red cross
* Various newspapers report that the health product giant Johnson & Johnson
is suing the Red Cross for using the red cross as a logo. Johnson &
Johnson registered the trademark in 1887, six years after the us-american
Red Cross started to use it. Needless to say, that a red cross has been in
use for much longer and that european Red Cross associations also exist
for quite some more years.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 20 Aug 2007 08:59:07 +0200
blogging (1-120) life; title=again
* Again I have 99 unread mails in my mailbox ;-)
* More than two weeks ago I watched [1 Inbox zero], which I recommend you
to watch if you have problems coping with your inbox, even if it mostly
boils down to "getting things done".
* /me smiles and continues to update tuxmath :-)
[1] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=973149761529535925
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 19 Aug 2007 14:45:08 +0200
blogging (1-119) life; title=Debians 24th birthday
* So Debian is now 14 years old - ignoring the timezone differences :-)
Thanks for all your contributions and have fun with Debian today and
everyday! ;-)
* While thinking about it, I remembered a question I was recently asked in
an interview to look into my crystal ball and tell how Debian will look
like in ten years. I couldn't really figure out a concrete answer, I just
said vaguely that I hope it changes in some ways, while I hope other
things stay like they are.
* What do you think?
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:31:48 +0200
blogging (1-118) life; title=First three days of CCCamp
* It's shortly after midnight and day one of the cccamp is "over". Which
doesn't mean the "first" day is over at all, lots of intergalactic
hackerparties are going on and besides, most people didn't arrive today
but earlier.
* I guess the most amazing thing I've seen where two people forging two
different kinds of steel, something I haven't expected to see here at all
:) The atmosphere, the people and their projects, the light effects and
the venue are simply wow. The venue is an ex military airport turned into
an open air museum and now hosting the Chaos Communication Camp 2007 with
2000 participants coming from ma
ny countries and backgrounds and involved in a diversity of stuff.
* The Debian gathering currently is more private camping than a open booth,
though we have a huge tent to use, we have not really done so so far:
today it was more important to get a decent sun shade for where our
private tents are and relaxing and socialising...
* The above I wrote at the end of the first night and then yesterday I was
busy setting up the Debian village or corner in one of the huge Freifunk
tents and getting some backlog done. Now we are having some table space
(and some unused sofa space) next to the openWRT and the GnuRadio project,
which gives lots of opportunities for interesting discussions, plus there
are some workshops (mostly soldering) taking place in this tent as well.
* And now I'll go out to go to buy some tickets for a round flight above
the camp :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 10 Aug 2007 15:56:06 +0200
blogging (1-117) life; title=blog recycling
* [1 This] makes me smile.
* And even the DM GR makes me smile, as I hope it will pass :-) [2 Stefano]
summarized nicely why I think DMs are a good thing.
* And "as usual" [3 Joey] came up with a new interesting thought: <i> The
interesting thing to consider is, if this vote fails, how can the bug be
fixed without another vote?</i>
[1] http://bjorn.haxx.se/debian/testing.pl?package=fai-kernels
[2] http://www.bononia.it/~zack/blog//posts/2007/07/me_on_DM.html
[3] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/voting_on_sponsorship/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 27 Jul 2007 10:44:11 +0200
blogging (1-116) life; title=Tuareg...
* Half a year ago Tolimar [1 blogged about a book] called Tuareg, which
sounded very interesting, so I asked him to lend it to me, which he
did in Edinburgh. Last night, I decided to read a bit, to calm down
before going to sleep. At 5am I had finished the book... :) And I
must say, I really really liked it, including those two last chapters
Tolimar didnt like :) Not exactly a happy end, but IMO a very good end.
Recommended to read.
[1] http://blog.schmehl.info/Debian/book-review-tuareg
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:51:33 +0200
blogging (1-115) life; title=nuclear power is safe and pigs can fly
* Hamburg is surrounded by four nuclear power plants, and two of those were
partly on fire two weeks ago. So far, so bad. Now a list from 2001
is [1 becoming public] which describes on 50000 pages (no joke) the
problems in one of the four. I guess Debian has less than 50000 known and
open bugs....
* Not to mention that nuclear waste needs to be stored securily for several
ten thousand years and that so far this problem has not been really solved.
* But I guess I don't care either: I guess the problems of war, hunger,
global warming and the fights for oil and clean water and food will become
much more pressing in a much shorter timeframe...
* So enjoy life like there is no tomorrow! But also keep in mind that there
might be a tomorrow or next year, and that you'd still want the earth to
be a nice place to be. And don't tell me I should stop smoking for my
future. If, I should stop it for my present well being.
* Back to virtual reality now...
[1] http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,494850,00.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:32:20 +0200
blogging (1-114) life; title=DebConf7 videos
* Not really any new videos yet, but at least the [1 existing videos] from
DebConf7 are now available in low and high quality.
* I'll keep you informed on the progress on providing the rest and possible
also with information how you can help.
* And I'm running ion3 again, yay! So much faster...
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2007/debconf7/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 2 Jul 2007 17:33:50 +0200
blogging (1-113) life; title=Happy Camper
* [1 ikiwiki] rules my world! Today I switched [2 debian-community.org] and my
personal todo list to ikiwiki, and I must say, I'm impressed and happy.
Just being able to use svn+vim to edit and organize a wiki or more
generally, information, really rocks. Joey, thanks a swarm of fish for
ikiwiki!!
* On a somewhat, very loosly related note, I've decided to give up on gnome
and beryl, and go back to ion2 or maybe 3. Beryl and Gnome are nice and
fancy, and it's good to show others that Debian can be beautiful, but
a.) it's way slower than using ion as window manager. And b.) I'm now
running 2.6.21 and have been using [3 powertop]... ;) Maybe I'll come
back to a typical desktop UI with Lenny.. :)
* And, now you might ask, how is this related? I formerly used [4 Riot] as
Information Organisation Tool, which is written by the same author as ion.
That said, I totally want to run a free fork of ion3 with a proper licence.
* I *heart* debian stable with custom repositories! :)
[1] http://ikiwiki.info
[2] http://debian-community.org
[3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/powertop
[4] http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/riot/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 30 Jun 2007 23:12:59 +0200
blogging (1-112) life; title=home again
* Incredible but true: from the three cities in three countries I've been in
today, Hamburg is the warmest.
* Managed to "read" half of my 11000 mails backlog today during the journey,
yay!
* Unpacked all the tech stuff on my bed and managed to do laundry already,
yay yay!
* Found a nice green surprise on my Desktop at home, when I came back. Yay
to more tech toys ;-)
* Missing DebConf again and already! Thanks to everyone who made it a great
experience, I'm looking forward to DebConf8 already :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 25 Jun 2007 19:55:58 +0200
blogging (1-111) life; title=two weeks in Edinburgh
* Today it's been two weeks since I've landed in Edinburgh. On my trip I
starting writing a blog post which since then I haven't had time to
finish. By now my workload has become a lot less, but it's still to high
to finish that post, which is mostly about my involvement in OLPC, if I
remember correctly :-)
* I'll stop here now and finish that post later, so I can do some videoteam
and non-videoteam stuff, like preparing my talk about debian-comunity.org
and having fun and chats with other people. And creating another loldebian
blog post, which obviously has very high priority ;-)
* There is no rain in Edinburgh. Except maybe yesterday.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 21 Jun 2007 17:41:47 +0200
blogging (1-110) life; title=linuxtag was harmless fun
* I wrote this 15h ago:
* It's midnight, the sun is shining, below me are beautiful montains, partly
covered in snow. In less than 48h I will be home again.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 2 Jun 2007 15:14:41 +0200
blogging (1-109) life; title=towel day
* Today is [1 towel day] and after quite some real sunny days this morning
it's raining and lightning and thunder... I think I like a purely symbolic
towel day better ;-)
* Don't leave home without it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towel_Day
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 25 May 2007 10:49:55 +0200
blogging (1-108) life; title=freedom is like health
* You will probably only see its real value and scope, when you have lost
it already.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 22 May 2007 13:51:09 +0200
blogging (1-107) life; title=mmmm i love unix and debian
* Converting all filenames from latin1 filenames to utf8? apt-cache search
tree utf ; sudo apt-get install convmv ; man convmv ; convmv -f latin1
-t utf-8 -r $path
* Add --notest for full flavor :)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 16 May 2007 15:29:30 +0200
blogging (1-106) life; title=all numbers can be 0wned
* By clicking on [1 this link] you possible violate the DMCA again, it
contains yet another 0wned number. But it also has instructions how
to make up your own 128 bit number, which noone else can legally use
anymore - in countries where the DMCA is valid or can be enforced.
So, better don't click ;-) Or much rather, better do.
* If I were bored, I would probably play with the [2 vanity gpg key]
generator, to generate a very special gpg key, but I'm not bored :)
Also it's not quite so much fun, to start a script and wait.
[1] http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/07/howto_own_a_128bit_n.html
[2] http://www.ccc.de/congress/2004/fahrplan/event/131.de.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 8 May 2007 14:03:49 +0200
blogging (1-105) life; title=another video and more licence joy
* [1 Sam] blogged about a talk he gave about the Debian project, which is
available as a video (in french) too. Since I believe
meetings-archive.debian.net should collect all (more or less relevant)
videos about Debian, I [2 copied it overthere] to preserve it for teh future.
* And once again, the licence fun strikes. Neither the video nor the slides
are accompanied with one. I have good faith that they are licenced freely,
but I'd like to know for sure...
[1] http://sam.zoy.org/blog/2007-05-07-bits-from-the-dpl-blog-talks-ftp-master
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2007/etch-install-party-carrefour-du-numerique/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 7 May 2007 12:17:38 +0200
blogging (1-104) life; title=more uploads and less manual configuration
* Yesterday I did my first uploads of my own packages to Debian! Yay :)
Though nothing spectacular: fai-kernels to unstable, build against 2.6.20
and fixing a wishlist bug for adding a driver with is in the normal
kernels and fai-kernels to stable-proposed-updates fixing the same
wishlist bug.
* Then I decided to do a full backup over night and reinstall my laptop with
FAI in the morning, to see if all my (systems) configuration is now done
correctly and automatically. Well, now it is :-) And as I kept my
home-dir, everything looks (and is) the same as yesterday. Yay!
* With one exception: I threw editing files for network configuration on my
laptop away and switched to network-manager(-gnome). After reading
/usr/share/doc/network-manager/README.Debian I added myself to the netdev
group (I hope this is done automatically if doing a desktop install with
d-i) and now it works very nicely, also with WPA :)
* Right, since two and a half weeks I switched away from ion3. To gnome :)
So far I like it, but let's see what I run in half a year...
* Now I hope I'll get that real cheap (oldie but goldie) ISDN mobile phone
on ebay, so I can have some fun with asterisk soonish. I'm getting this
new ISDN phone so that I can keep my old landline setup intact - for the
time when I set up asterisk and after that.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:13:00 +0200
blogging (1-103) life; title=etch live-CDs available
* Actually I have nothing to do with it, I just thought I announce them here
as I haven't seen them announced anywhere. I have tried the Gnome desktop
one today and it worked nicely, there are also images with KDE and Xfce
available on [1 live.debian.net].
* So I guess I'll carry three media around with me in future: the
multiarch-DVD and CD (as nicely described by [2 Joey Hess]) and an i386
live-CD - unfortunatly live CDs for other archs are not available yet.
[1] http://live.debian.net/etch-builds/
[2] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/tour_of_the_Debian_4.0_CDs/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 20 Apr 2007 21:31:56 +0200
blogging (1-102) life; title=xp and office for 3$
* The company which latest real innovation was Clippy [1 plans] to give away
their flagship products in certain parts of the world for 3$ now. I would
not be surprised if their shares are worth less than that by 2015 :-)
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6571139.stm
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 20 Apr 2007 09:37:03 +0200
blogging (1-101) life; title=first uploads
* I've just done my first uploads to a debian.org machine, even if that
"only" were powerpc builds of clamav for volatile etch and sarge, yay!
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:48:29 +0200
blogging (1-100) life; title=Singing not whining
* Even though the network at dudesconf worked flawlessly even for me after
whining here about my laptop on saturday, I have now resolved to
concentrate on positive aspects here, as I believe Debian as much as
everybody else needs positive thinking rather than negative thoughts.
* Dudesconf/DebConf.es3 rocked, though two days is a bit too short :) Caring
organizers, almost 24h food supply, vegetarian food for the needy, meeting
"old faces" again, being able to attach new faces to old nicks/names and
meeting new people. And doing some juggling once again for more than two
minutes.
* On another positive aspect, the new server for debian-community.org is now
up and running etch with a 2.4.27 kernel from sarge (because of [1 317258]),
the content will be migrated either tonite after work (I doubt
it) or mañana. Seperate post still pending...
* [2 Bastian], I completly agree. Is any artist reading this and able to
dedicate some time and effort to create (a) proposal(s) for a better
design for wiki.debian.org? I believe the proper place to propose designs
and discuss them is the debian-www list, though any place is fine for
posting proposals.
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/317258
[2] http://blog.venthur.de/2007/04/15/since-more-and-more-people-are-referencing-to-wikidebianorg/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:15:25 +0200
blogging (1-99) life; title=let the beer flow at least
* Frustration and (missing) flow blew my mind away in the last hours. I
didn't count them properly, but I would guess I had more than 20 network
connection losses today. And in at least 75% of them I was working online
or in the middle of an irc conversation.
* Then I switched to wired networking and after 5min I had another network
crash. Ten minutes later my laptop froze completly when loading planet.
* So I switched to a beer flow. I'm uneasy to commit to drink a beer for
each network loss, but this is how I feel at the moment.
* Besides these little annoyances, dudesconf is pretty and pretty well
organized, thanks and kudos to the team making this possible and taking
care of many little details. You rock! I haven't heard anybody else
complain about the network so I guess it's my lovely hardware - which is
running etch, reinstalled this wednesday, so I don't blame the software
except some drivers for not properly (as in open) documented hardware.
* I'm looking forward to next year when I can easily justify buying a new
laptop to myself.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 14 Apr 2007 19:06:18 +0200
blogging (1-98) life; title=I hope at least it's sunny in Brussels too
* While taking a coffee break while driving to Dudesconf in A Coruna today,
I saw Hamburg in the news on spanish TV. It seems the weather in Hamburg
is so good currently, that it's newsworthy on spanish TV :-)
* As long as it doesnt rain too much, I dont care about the weather...
And currently I'm happy to sit here in a gym with around 20 Debian geeks,
and look forward to get some Debian stuff done on the weekend...
debian-community.org really deserves some attention, but I won't be
surprised if dont find time the next 36h.
* For those who wonder: Dudesconf really is DebConf.es3 - I have no idea why
it's not called like this.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 14 Apr 2007 02:25:49 +0200
blogging (1-97) life; title=joy and pain
* My plan for coming home yesterday evening was simple: go to init 1 on my
laptop and do a full backup while I sleep, followed by a reinstall with
fai in the morning. That part of the plan worked pretty well: after less
than then an hour of work, aeh, actually waiting and having breakfast, my
laptop is 100% setup as it was yesterday, running shiny beryl on etch and
all the configuration is the same as it was yesterday. Yay! Looks, feels
and is the same system, but the installation is 60min old. So much for the
joy.
* The pain also started when I came home yesterday: the datacenter where my
server is hosted had a huge power outtage yesterday evening and this
morning there were and currently still are some hundred customers getting
their machines up again. I wonder what exactly happend to turn off the
power for a whole datacenter (they have megawatt sized diesel generators
for power backup) but at least I'm happy it's not a hardware failure on my
server. And while my server and services is up again since more than an
hour, www.aol.de, which is also hosted there, is still down ;-)
<b>Update:</b> The power was only gone for 40min, the rest of outtage is
still a bit of a mystery to me: outgoing connections worked fine, incoming
not at all. So I'm not really convinced that it wasn't coincidence that
the reboot fixed my server...
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:04:10 +0200
blogging (1-96) life; title=modern life told in pictures
* Absolutly [1 amazing pictures]!
[1] http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 6 Apr 2007 12:16:56 +0200
blogging (1-95) life; title=my first act as a DD
* I just voted :) Dunno yet if that worked, but if not, I'll manage... as
I'm pretty tired I decided to vote one plattform, not person, the same as
NOTA (as I really think those ideas won't do Debian any good, quite the
contrary). Maybe I'll change that in a few days, dunno yet.
* Due to being quite busy with work the last days or rather weeks, this was
my first act as a DD, which I couldn't do before. I'm still using my
guest-alioth account and due to the freeze (yay!) no uploads yet.
* Quite to the contrary (not really, but I find it very ironic) I've build
my first rpm yesterday :-) I ported fai to fedora... more on this soon.
* Since a week ago debian-community.org runs on its own server, currently
managed by three admins with fai. The webpage is still static html, but
ikiwiki should be up on the weekend, in some free minutes I already looked
into it and played with it on the new machine. I'll write a more detailed
blog entry about this when it's ready.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 27 Mar 2007 08:23:42 +0200
blogging (1-94) life; title=little details again
* [1 Marc], fwiw imo LCD-displays and RAM-memory are much more fun :-) ymmv.
[1] http://blog.zugschlus.de/archives/526-About-Acronyms-and-non-Acronyms.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:00:38 +0100
blogging (1-93) life; title=Please think of the animals formerly known as kittens
* [1 Pretty please]!
[1] http://developer.mozilla.org/wiki-images/en/e/e0/Moz_ffx_openStandards_1024x768.jpg
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:15:58 +0100
blogging (1-92) life; title=Monthy Python 2.0
* I believe this [1 website] is a new venture from Monthy Python. It's
completly hillarious. Don't miss "baby got bible", "the atheist",
basically all videos from "SoldierInGodsArmy" and countless other
gems.
* I'm also amused thinking about the job of the editors. I'm sure they
have a hard time, sorting out which videos are tagged "feature this"
for fun rather than seriously and similar with the "inapproriate" tagged
ones. And watching the videos doesn't really help them :-)
* Claimer: obviously, if religion wouldn't have killed and destroyed
so many lives (and still is), this would be even more funny. And I would
make less fun about religious people like those. Amen.
* And if you believe that there is one god or one goddess or seven or 23,
fine with me. I think [2 we are just a bunch of monkeys] anyway.
[1] http://godtube.com/
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a15KgyXBX24
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:03:50 +0100
blogging (1-91) life; title=Now I understand...
* So [1 Jeff] went vegan, so that he can drive a nice, small & [2 shiny car]
with good conscience ;-)
* More seriously, I don't think that even with Smarts it's possible to be
ecological if everybody drives ones own car.
[1] http://jbailey.livejournal.com/33311.html
[2] http://www.hummer-h1.ch/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:21:27 +0100
blogging (1-90) life; title=Dellbian
* Vote for [1 Debian] GNU/other! ;-)
* In other news, I can vote in Debian now, too :-) And instead of thanking
here all the people who helped and supported me in NM (for which I'm very
thankful, indeed), I'd like to thank all the people who make and made
Debian a great operating system and a fun place "to be". Keep on rocking!
* And [2 Gunnar], congrats to you too! I'm impressed and a bit envious :-)
[1] http://www.dell.com/linuxsurvey
[2] http://www.gwolf.org/index.php?blog/show/215
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:26:18 +0100
blogging (1-89) life; title=finally almost summer
* Today was the first time this year I walked the dog wearing nothing but a
t-shirt - well almost :-) Yay!!! 2nd day with blue sky in a row!!1
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:06:33 +0100
blogging (1-88) life; title=DebConf needs help
* We need to send out invitation letters for people needing a Visa to come
to DebConf. And we really need to do this soon, as a Visa application
process can take months. So it needs to be done real soon now.
* So if you have some spare time (I don't) and care about people coming from
countries needing a Visa to visit UK, please read [1 this thread].
* As I understand it (which might be wrong or inaccurate) the Debian UK or
DebConf Ltd. people want more feedback from UK visa officials outside the
UK. I'm sure there is better information how you can help in this thread,
if not, please ask.
[1] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20070306.200404.86f3007b.en.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:17:42 +0100
blogging (1-87) life; title=secure remote controlled aircrafts
* What a joke. If they are really remote controlled it would mean teh
terrorists don't even have to enter airplanes to do evilfoo, they can hack
and control them remotly. And even if the autopilot is not remote
controlled, but just a local computer in the plane, it can be hacked and
programmed.
* Computers, surveillance and control don't create security. Justice, food
and basic needs do.
* -
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:17:41 +0100
blogging (1-86) life; title=for those who cannot wait
* The low quality theora versions of the [1 videos from the Debian Devroom]
at FOSDEM 2007 are available online now.
* Better quality ones and slides will follow as they appear.
* The encoded videos from the NetConf and the Formal Dependency Management
talks are broken, the DV files look ok, so I expect I will be able to fix
them, but this might take some time.
* Enjoy :-)
* P.S.: Maybe it's worthwhile to go for speaker microphones next year...
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2007/fosdem/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 3 Mar 2007 16:07:49 +0100
blogging (1-85) life; title=FOSDEM videos and d-community.org
* FOSDEM was great! And too short. (But this is maybe a feature.) And too
crowded, which is also a feature. Too tired for more, I am only blogging
anyway, cause I cannot sleep and because I realized I should probably
comment on the videos here, instead of answering many times indiviudally.
* The recording of the videos went fine. I have all 13 talks of the debian
devroom on (unchecked) tapes. Thanks to Herman for the camera, I'll send
your powersupply to you tomorrow.
* A hour of DV needs about 13 GB. So I need to buy a new hard drive. Then I
need to give it to a friend, who'll copy the tapes to disc. Then encoding
and uploading. If all goes well, the videos should be online in a week or
two. Definitly, when they're ready :-)
* The debian-community talk went well, although I was too much in a hurry,
because I had to start late due to the previous talk and having to end
5min early, so pixie could get her (then belated) plan back (with the
camera and awesome tripod). I got quite some good feedback, which already
resulted in a bit further developing of some ideas, which I "documented"
on #debian-community before writing this. More to come.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 27 Feb 2007 01:54:05 +0100
blogging (1-84) life; title=FOSDEM
* Wow! Great and unexpected network at FOSDEM! Yay! At least in the Debian
developer room. The camera is also set up and we recorded the first talk
already :-)
* FOSDEM is organized pretty well this year again and again it's great to
meet so many different people here!
* More "later", but rather after the weekend, I prefer to talk to people
here instead of writing long blog entries... :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 24 Feb 2007 15:38:31 +0100
blogging (1-83) life; title=debian-community.org
* I wanted to write a much longer blogpost about [1 debian-community.org]
before FOSDEM, where I'll have a opportunity to present the idea in some
greater detail anyway. But as we are about to leave from the Debian-Edu
[2 gathering in Soissons], I guess my time will not allow it.
* So I will not waste much time to describe here, what debian-community.org
is about, you can read about most of the ideas on the webpage already
anyway. I have quite some more ideas and concrete plans, which I will
reveal in Brussels and after that on the site itself.
* And for those, who cannot make it to FOSDEM (or just to [3 my presentation],
which is at the end of the schedule) the DebConf videoteam will also
(try to) record the talks in the Debian room at FOSDEM - we'll see if that
will work :-)
* Besides being aware since some time that Debian has developers and users
and (officially) nothing in between, there were two talks at LCA2007
which inspired me to start debian-community.org: the talk by Jono Bacon
about the [4 ubuntu community] and the keynote from Kathy Sierra about
[5 passionate users]. I suggest you watch both, they both are very
insightful. If you are really low on time, I really suggest to find some.
And if you can't, watch Kathy's :-)
* But personally I think both are a must see. They changed my way of
thinking about Debian, the OS, the project and the community. Thanks
Kathy and Jono!
* Oh, last but definitly not least: please join the #irc-channel, the list
(both linked on the website) and get involved. Especially if you want to
help to shape your local(ized) debian community!
[1] http://debian-community.org
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/DevCampFrance2007
[3] http://fosdem.org/2007/schedule/events/debian_community
[4] http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2007/video/talks/173.ogg
[5] http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2007/video/friday/Friday_0900_Sierra.ogg
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 23 Feb 2007 16:11:54 +0100
blogging (1-82) life; title=OLPC questioned
* Tuesday I gave a talk about debian-edu to members of the [1 Emmaüs]
community, who are - among other activites - refurbishing old computers,
make them usuable again by installing debian-edu and (keep or) send them
to Africa. They looked quite puzzled when I mentioned our cooperation with
[2 OLPC] and what OLPC intends to do: send new computers to developing
countries! I resolved this by saying that I think both approaches are
useful, as this will spread access to technology and knowledge faster ;-)
* While fixing my slides after the talk (which btw are based on the same
talk held at LCA and were now translated to [3 french]) I discovered this
[4 interesting] [5 critisism] to OLPC. After reading them, I still think
both approaches are useful, but recycling should definitly not been
forgotten over this "new toy" :-) TMTOWTDI!
[1] http://www.emmaus-international.org
[2] http://www.laptop.org
[3] http://layer-acht.org/slides/
[4] http://www.fairinternational.org/fi-artikkel_245.nml
[5] http://www.fairinternational.org/fi-artikkel_244.nml
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 22 Feb 2007 15:44:52 +0100
blogging (1-81) life; title=life's too short
* ...so I left some more IRC channels. for now I'll stay on those
mailinglists, but if the unfun continues, I'll stop that too. Ironically
just when I have time for IRC again...
* Have fun!
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 18 Feb 2007 21:23:45 +0100
blogging (1-80) life; title=gone from irc for a while
* I just decided I will leave most IRC channels now, for hopefully not more
than a week. I'm busy with $work$, or rather I need to be more busy with
it, and IRC is too much distracting me, resulting in less work getting done
and being to hectic and harsh on IRC as well.
* You can query me on IRC, but usually I prefer mails. See you in a while...
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 12 Feb 2007 14:26:25 +0100
blogging (1-79) life; title=ARRRRRRgentina!
* Mañana arrrrrrgentina will probably be annouced offically as the location
for DebConf8!
* Kudos to the Venezuelian team for their (almost equally) great bid and very
fair behaviour in the decision meeting! In the end of the meeting when I saw
.ar as the winner (not by much, but enough to be willing to go for it), I
feared a painful end, but no, the opposite happened.
* Thank you all. And now let's make DebConf7 a real fun and productive event
first! :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 12 Feb 2007 00:29:06 +0100
blogging (1-78) life; title=The world as seldom seen before...
* Browse these [1 maps to see the world] with different eyes.
[1] http://www.worldmapper.org/textindex/text_index.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 2 Feb 2007 14:02:47 +0100
blogging (1-77) life; title=a small rant about the sun or rather the lack of it
* Yesterday it was cold (which is no problem in itself for me) and rainy
(which is!) in Hamburg. Having to go outside various times, my mood went
down during the day, as the rain kept going... late at night my mode got
better, but that's another story :-)
* Today, the sun shone in my face when I woke up, when I went out and up to
now it's still sunny. Yay! Yay yay yay even!!
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 1 Feb 2007 11:43:00 +0100
blogging (1-76) life; title=Chaos Communication Camp 2007
* The [1 CCCamp 2007] will be held from August 8th lasting until August 12th
2007 on an airport museum close to Berlin - you can go there directly by
plane! :)
* If you have no idea what a chaos communication camp is, check out this
[2 video from the camp 2003] - basically its 2000 hackers, camping,
outside, lots of workshops, lectures and crazy - and somehow computer
related - stuff happening, connected to the outside world with a nice
fat uplink - in 2003 it was 155mbps :)
* I don't think a debian booth is appropriate there, but a debian camp
inside the camp would be fun!
[1] http://events.ccc.de/2007/01/24/chaos-communication-camp-2007/
[2] http://chaosradio.ccc.de/media/video/chaos_communication_camp_2003.m4v
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 26 Jan 2007 09:02:58 +0100
blogging (1-75) life; title=Melbourne...
* [1 Andree], it's been announced in the LCA closing ceremony: [2 Melbourne]
will be brilliant! :)
* Currently Melbourne is not so brilliant: I have fever and lay in bed. And
except for the really beautiful botanic garden I have not seen much yet,
and I somewhat doubt I'll see a lot more this time.
[1] http://andreeleidenfrost.blogspot.com/2007/01/linuxconfau-2007-gleanings.html
[2] httP://www.mel8ourne.org
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 25 Jan 2007 10:21:48 +0100
blogging (1-74) life; title=SLUG meeting
* Yesterday I attended the [1 Sydney Linux User Group] january meeting and
gave a talk about the DebConf video-team and the differences in our setups
compared to LCA2007 ([2 slides available] now, video soon).
* It was good to see a bunch of people from LCA again and the 2nd talk about
[3 slack], googles internal maintainance tool which was just freed, was
also quite interesting. For me there was nothing really new, as slack
works quite similar as [4 FAI], the interesting part was to compare them :)
* Unfortunatly I didn't see the report about googles summer of code, as it
was held in parallel. But you can't have icecream with fries :-)
* Fortunatly I also could attend the [5 Sydney linuxchix] meeting before the
SLUG meeting, where a good introduction to Ruby on Rails was given.
* Relocating to Melbourne now - cheers and thanks to everyone in Sydney
contributing to the good times I had here! :-)
[1] http://slug.org.au/node/55
[2] http://layer-acht.org/slides/
[3] http://www.sundell.net/~alan/projects/slack/
[4] http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/fai
[5] http://sydney.linuxchix.org/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 23 Jan 2007 03:35:06 +0100
blogging (1-73) life; title=swimming
* Yesterday we went swimming in Bondi beach in Sydney. While the air was
hot, around 40 degrees, the water was not: only 18! Freakin' cold :-D
* Today it's colder here, barely 30 degrees.
* And now you in the northern hemisphere can all hate me :-)
* More debian/lca/foms related blogging still pending, etoobusy.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 22 Jan 2007 01:08:12 +0100
blogging (1-72) life; title=mmmmmmmmmmmmm
* Thanks. And many more hugs.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:57:51 +0100
blogging (1-71) life; title=not much blogging - just some slides
* It's all about motivation and at the moment I'm not really motivated to
seriously blog about my time at LCA, I'm simply too exhausted.
* My talks about the debian-edu and live-package yesterday went well, it's
just a pity the microphone died during the live-package talk, so that
there won't be a video from it, as video without audio is quite useless :)
* The only useful thing I could think of today, was to start to collect the
[1 slides of all talks] I have been given (and will be giving) in a central
location on my server, so you can easily find them. Currently only the LCA
and FOMS slides are there, I will add the rest, when I'm ready ;-) That's
also when I'll finish my report about the FOMS conference :-/
* I guess I need a nap.
[1] http://layer-acht.org/slides
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 16 Jan 2007 05:00:59 +0100
blogging (1-70) life; title=The trip to planet LCA
* 5 days ago I started my journey to Australia on monday afternoon by going
to Hamburg airport. The security at London Heathrow was disgusting and
silly as expected, but I won't go into much more detail here, just one
thing: the memory of losing my beloved Free Software Foundation pullover
last summer at a security checkpoint at LHR made me kept checking my stuff
all the time, which somehow fitted very well in the paranoia... But I
should also mention the one plus thing in Terminal 4: a nice smoking lounge
with power sockets and comfy chairs. Anyway...
* The flight entertainment system in the 747 was very cool, with lots of
movies and documentaries on demand, so that I didnt bother to read any of
the books I packed nor used my laptop batteries completly, though the
latter was mostly due to the lack of space in the plane and having worked
quite a bit prior to leaving. So I watched four movies to not fall asleep
in the (european) night and get into australian timezone, which worked more
or less quite well. Not sleeping is a good way to switch timezones, but the
side effect is sleepiness, doh!
* Out of those four movies the only one really worth mentioning is "Little
miss sunshine", a really great movie, very funny and quite insightful as
well. See it! On my way back I might even choose to see it again :) I
didn't really understand much of the english in "the black dahlia" but it
was quite interesting to see how smoking once was ubiquitous as the war on
terror is today :)
* The flight itself was not as bad and boring as expected, they even thought
about the poor smokers and made the whole plane get out in Bankgok, only
to enter it again 30min later. Needless to say that it took those 400 people
a bit longer...
* BTW, and in case the famous lazyweb is reading: Kolkata (formerly called
Calcutta) from 10km above really looked like it was swamped, but according
to wikipedia this only happens in summer. Any ideas what I saw / why it
looks liked this?
* When I arrived in Sydney, I was not only welcomed by the sun and summer
(yaaaaaay!!), but also by Sylvia, the (main) [1 FOMS organizer], who was
so very kind to come to the airport at 7.30 AM to pick me up (yaaay!). More
about FOMS in another blog entry very soon to come.
[1] http://www.annodex.org/events/foms2007/Main/HomePage
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 13 Jan 2007 12:27:37 +0100
blogging (1-69) life; title=killergames and hackertools
* Erich, it's not only [1 killergames] which threatens the legal
distribution of linux in germany, but also hackertools like ping, ethereal
or nmap. Check out [2 this article] (german only), which explains the new
law which will come into effect in germany on the 15th of march this year.
* Obviously you need hackertools, to be able to check if you're system is
secure or vulnerable, but unfortunatly common sense is a lost art
nowadays.
* More maybe later, I'm in a hurry, but I at least wanted to make this
remark. More discussion and evaluation of this is definitly needed!
[1] http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/linux/debian/2007011001-csu-macht-debian-illegal
[2] http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/82996
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:35:58 +0100
blogging (1-68) life; title=the previous post
* Maybe I should have made clearer, that the previous post was not debian
related, except for the foms/lca bit.
* As I'm waiting for the overwriting the new disc with random data to finish
anyway, I'll use the time to work on my next, debian related post: my
impressions from [1 23C3].
[1] http://events.ccc.de/2007/01/04/23c3-lecture-videos-forthcoming/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 6 Jan 2007 21:58:58 +0100
blogging (1-67) life; title=always look on the bright side of life...
* And chances are you'll never be forgotten! Thanks for the joy and jolly,
excuse my lack of time today, I'm preparing stuff for my hopefully very
joyful journey to [1 FOMS] and [2 linux.conf.au 2007] :-)
* Enough said for you and me, and now and here, so have hugs and happy days!
/me smiles.
[1] http://www.annodex.org/events/foms2007/
[2] http://lca2007.linux.org.au/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 6 Jan 2007 16:07:17 +0100
blogging (1-66) life; title=happy new year!
* As a start, I just want to quote and link to what Ganneff said last year
already: Thanks, [1 Have a good new year and continue the good work]!
[1] http://ganneff.de/blog/2006/12/27#thanks
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 1 Jan 2007 15:04:42 +0100
blogging (1-65) life; title=Who can you trust?
* Only six days until [1 23C3] basically starts. I'm looking very much
forward to [2 lots of interesting stuff] and much more I guess. (The
schedule is made with Pentabarf which we're also using for [3 DebConf7],
btw.)
* Also this year for the first time there will be a
[4 chaotic debian presence] where we would very much appreciate your help
which will be rewarded with a badge like the one below :-)
* Please [5 leave your name on the wiki page] or tell [6 Mario] or me if you
intend to help and that we should prepare a badge for you :-)
* <img src="http://layer-acht.org/23c3-debian_small.jpg" />
[1] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/
[2] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2006/Fahrplan/
[3] https://debconf7.debconf.org
[4] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEventsCCCBerlin
[5] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEventsCCCBerlin
[6] http://blog.marioiseli.com/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 20 Dec 2006 21:46:11 +0100
blogging (1-64) life; title=happy customer
* Yesterday I ordered three books at [1 bookzilla.de], they arrived here
less than 36h later. But what I like most is, that they give the full
provision they earn (5% of the price you pay) to the
[2 Free Software Foundation Europe]. It's also nice that shipping in
germany in free.
[1] http://www.bookzilla.org
[2] http://www.germany.fsfeurope.org/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:07:20 +0100
blogging (1-63) life; title=language shapes our behaviour
* If you agree you might understand why I blog about the sign in front of
a restaurant I just passed by. Compare "buffet libre" with "all you can
eat".
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 18 Dec 2006 19:19:48 +0100
blogging (1-62) life; title=no video homework?
* Due to the excellent infrastructure here, four out of five talks are
already online at the [1 usual suspects location], and the fifth talk,
well, has not been held yet :-)
* I expect other formats to be available later today, and then I'll also
come up with better filenames and send a mail to the qa-list.
* Now off for breakfast!
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/qa-meeting-badajoz/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 16 Dec 2006 08:44:20 +0100
blogging (1-61) life; title=the many faces of QA
* The miboot enabled d-i sarge floppies for oldworld powerpc are now
available again, you can find them on [1 layer-acht.org].
When/if :) I become a DD, I'll move them to people.d.o and leave a note on
my webserver...
* Just like [2 last year], the video-team (thanks Cesar, por todo!) will
make the [3 recordings of this years talks] available when they are ready.
I will announce them here and on the -qa list then.
* Besides this, I have been mostly working on debian-edu and enjoying being
in a very nice old town with a bunch of geeks.
[1] http://layer-acht.org/d-i-miboot/
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/qa-meeting-darmstadt/
[3] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/qa-meeting-badajoz/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 15 Dec 2006 12:19:17 +0100
blogging (1-60) life; title=on a second thought
* On my way to the QA meeting in Extremadura today, where I am now using the
hotels wireless, "secured" by very poor obscurity, I thought about my
[1 blog post of earlier today], and I would like to add two things now:
* 16 million ip addresses for continents of 0.5 to 2 billion people per
continent is *really* little,
* ipv6 will give us roughly 667 quadrillion addresses per square millimeter
of the earth's surface - but I believe the digital divide will become
worse. Two words: [2 net neutrality].
[1] http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-59
[2] http://www.savetheinternet.com/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 14 Dec 2006 01:26:37 +0100
blogging (1-59) life; title=virtual reality?
* You probably know this famous cartoon-map, the world according to Ronald
Reagan or the USA. Welcome to the [1 new world order]. Companies are as
big as whole continents. And there is still some room for more companies
or web 3.0.
* I wonder how IPv6 really looks like.
[1] http://xkcd.com/c195.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 13 Dec 2006 13:28:05 +0100
blogging (1-58) life; title=security? get over it
* It seems, that GnuPG has [1 much more problems] then the recently fixed
security hole. The linked post is unfortunatly in german (except for a
quote of some appearantly pretty bad code in gnupg). Fefe (who does code
reviews for a living) points out the following highlights: gnugp2
now includes graphical outputs (why o why), links non-optionally to
libusb and a smartcard-library, and the code size has tripled since
version 1.0. And basically Werner Koch agrees with him: in
[2 the announcement] he writes, that the whole codebase needs a security
review, but they cannot afford to do it. Doh.
* Stefan Esser [3 retired from the PHP Security Response Team]. Until
reading his post I basically believed PHP code basically has so many
problems, because it's so easy to code. Today I just want to thank
[4 Alexander Wirt], [5 Jan Wagner] and Stefan Esser, the author of
suhosin.
* Last but not least, [6 firefox] or [7 iceweasel] also seems to have
[8 problems]. /me hugs dillo but misses its CSS support...
[1] http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=bb8644fb
[2] http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-announce/2006q4/000246.html
[3] http://blog.php-security.org/archives/61-Retired-from-securityphp.net.html
[4] http://packages.debian.org/testing/web/php4-suhosin
[5] http://packages.debian.org/testing/web/php5-suhosin
[6] http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=bb858612
[7] http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=bb858e72
[8] http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=bb859c83
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 10 Dec 2006 19:21:28 +0100
blogging (1-57) life; title=bash KDE or Gnome and support Microsoft
* If you ever said to someone (not deeply involved in free software), you
shouldn't use KDE, it sux, Gnome is much better, or if you said, you
shouldn't use Gnome, it sux, KDE is much better, then please read this
email about [1 hazardous or good arguments about desktop usability]
from Knut Yrvin.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2006/12/msg00015.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 8 Dec 2006 16:34:39 +0100
blogging (1-56) life; title=A true story from the deep internet
* <toresbe> I FOUND IT!!!
* <toresbe> I FOUND THE FIREWIRE CARD! \o/
* <p2-mate> hehe
* <p2-mate> it was somewhere between the cray CPU boards ? :)
* <toresbe> VAX :D
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 8 Dec 2006 11:40:49 +0100
blogging (1-55) life; title=freedom aint a value by itself alone
* i'm working on and advocating software freedoms, yet i wont be happy at
all, if a nuclear bomb would run debian to achieve its goal of killing
millions of people^w^w^w^wprotecting our freedoms.
* i value my freedom to jump into the cold elbe river in winter, but i
probably won't do it.
* and i really dislike it when people stink of too much parfum or of too
much dirt. but i value their freedoms to smell as they want as i value my
freedom (not) to wash myself when i feel like it, or to go away if it
stinks to me (or to stay despite so). and i also value your freedom to go
away or stay and/or tell me when i stink or smell good.
* freedom alone has no value. like money doesn't help if all food is
poisoned or you're in jail. likewise security is worthless without
freedom. and sometimes^walways someones freedom is taking away someone
elses freedom. freedom is a compromise and unlimited freedom can be as bad
or worse than no freedom. the tricky thing is to get dealing with the
limits right and in a free way.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 5 Dec 2006 13:31:57 +0100
blogging (1-54) life; title=tag your packages in no time
* The new [1 web-editor for debtags] is amazing! Very intuitive and easy
to use, I just tagged my packages in less than five minutes :) Try it.
* You'll get quite sensible suggestions for tags and the interface to view
and choose from all existing tags is, well, very intuitive and easy to
use! :) Choose 'view all tags' to get a view on all facets (a la
categories)...
* Try it! :)
* And if you're bored (which I'm not...), there is a nice overview of the
[2 150 most popular packages without tags]. Great work!
[1] http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/edit.html
[2] http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/todo.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 27 Nov 2006 13:12:40 +0100
blogging (1-53) life; title=download free software - patent it - profit
* Today I read that [1 Intel basically completly patented VoIP] as long as
the UI is somehow connected to a personal computer instead of a normal
telephone. What makes this madness even more braindead, is the fact that
[2 the patent was filed two month after the initial release of asterisk], a
free software for VoIP.
* /me goes to patent the wheel and the fork now. Oh wait, I don't have the
money to file a patent right now. Hopefully nobody with money reads this
blog ;-)
[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=7120140
[2] http://www.marko.net/asterisk/archives/9912/0000.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 24 Nov 2006 19:54:46 +0100
blogging (1-52) life; title=so you thought we would be coming to an end soon
* [1 JoeyH], thanks for [2 this link]! Glad to see that there are many many
releases to come :-)
[1] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/DWN_bits_3.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toy_Story_characters
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 22 Nov 2006 01:05:46 +0100
blogging (1-51) life; title=stuff I did today
* Prepared an upload for the new upstream version of tuxmath (two small
bugfixes only), who thankfully got sponsored again and immediatly by
by [1 Kari Pahula] - thanks again! A new upstream maintainer for tuxtype
has also been found, btw & yay!
* Finished setting up [2 failive.debian.net], which in future will
automatically build two fai-cds (currently only one), for fully
automatatic installation of the booted system. To better reflect that
those are not the usual live-cds, the vhost will soon be renamed to
[3 faicd.debian.net]...
* I also want to mention [4 edulive.debian.net] here, though I have done
nothing about it today. This should become a replacement for the current
[5 handmade live-cd], but currently its stalled by ENOTIME and [6 these]
[7 two] RC bugs.
* Speaking of debian-edu, I spent some parts of this afternoon to create
this [8 statuspage for the skolelinux repository] which got me more
familar with dak and which will hopefully help us keeping the archive in a
good state :-)
* Testing d-i RC1 on powerpc newworld was boring: d-i worked flawlessly and
the g-i mini.iso didn't boot. Will reburn and retry, but I don't have
great hopes on that one. The mini.iso from beginning of November worked
nicely though, so it's a minor issue.
[1] http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=kaol%40debian.org
[2] http://failive.debian.net
[3] http://faicd.debian.net
[4] http://edulive.debian.net
[5] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/SkoleLiveCd/Download
[6] http://bugs.debian.org/385950
[7] http://bugs.debian.org/398789
[8] http://developer.skolelinux.no/~holger/archivestatus/needs_love.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 19 Nov 2006 18:23:38 +0100
blogging (1-50) life; title=Solaris GPLed?
* I am amused to imagine what Jörg Schilling thinks about [1 this] :-) More
seriously and less rumor, thanks and kudos to Sun for freeing Java!
But Sun is hardly important for my well being, this is a job for the sun:
* And on a not related note, the sun rises so low now, that it shines onto
the desktop in my room. Yay to the nice effects of winter! Not that there
are that many, but there are some :)
[1] http://open.itworld.com/4914/061113opensolarisgpl/page_1.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 15 Nov 2006 11:21:28 +0100
blogging (1-49) life; title=happy birthday lieber basko!
* Today is the 11th of november, the day that Franzi and I decided almost
ten years ago, would be your birthday ;) I wish you a very happy birthday
and many many more happy days with [1 long] [2 walks], interesting smells
and lots of cakes and bones and all the other things a dog can [3 dream] of!
Next week we'll go on some nice long walks and you'll get another fresh
bone from me. I miss you and look forward to [4 see you] on monday! ;)
<img src="http://www.amayita.com/fotoblog/photos/img_1260.jpg" />
[1] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/450_march_2006/100_1029_Sm.jpg.108.html
[2] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/480_linuxhotel/100_0666_Sm.jpg.50.html
[3] http://www.amayita.com/fotoblog/?image=img_1214
[4] http://www.amayita.com/fotoblog/?image=dscn5817
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 11 Nov 2006 11:11:11 +0100
blogging (1-48) life; title=see you later
* I just left a bunch of debian IRC channels, and only stayed in the
[1 DebConf] ones and some technical ones I'm really interested in. While
I can sadly admit this is related to be being frustrated by the way Debian
has evolved recently, it's only partly because of that.
* IRC is quite a timesink (ironically thats the name of my media server at
home...) and I need to focus a lot more on stuff that brings money, cause
I neglected that too much since I (again) became a freelancer more than two
years ago.
* Last weekend I've tested d-i on powerpc and I have 6 bugs or so to file,
but I could only find the time to file [2 one] bug so far. Luckily the
others are less serious :) (And even more luckily for me I have done my
taxes now, which was the reason I only did the tests but didn't report
them immediatly.)
* I also have three blog posts half prepared, but no time and/or energy
to finish them. One is about my new development toy, an imac, which I use
for testing d-i and debian-edu powerpc. This is nothing really special,
but the nice thing, besides bringing debian-edu to more archs than i386
(please contact me if you are interested in amd64...) about it is my old
friend FAI, which helps me^w^wtakes care that I have to do nothing to get
the machine back into the state I want it after I erased the installation
to test stuff.
* The 2nd one I will actually post later today and about the third one, I
don't know.
* I hope this plan works out and I will also find some time in future to
work on the things in Debian I enjoy and/or find important. But at the
moment unfortunatly doing stuff I don't enjoy is more important, as it
pays the bills... Luckily this is only partly true, two out of three of my
money projects are actually (mostly) fun. Only one is a pain, but it's the
biggest and the most urgent one.
* /me waves, see you later :-)
[1] http://debconf.org
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/397716
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 11 Nov 2006 02:22:48 +0100
blogging (1-47) life; title=IT jobs for men only?
* A [1 nice example] of everyday sexism, I only noticed it when passing by the
third or fourth time.
<img src="http://layer-acht.org/it_jobs_for_men_only.jpg" />
(Note to non-german speaking readers: -in is a female ending)
[1] http://layer-acht.org/it_jobs_for_men_only.jpg
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 1 Nov 2006 16:57:29 +0100
blogging (1-46) life; title=some things always stay the same
* It's nice to know that in this world of constant change, some things
always stay the same: yesterday Microsoft released Internet Exploder 7,
and a few hours later the first vulnerabilities where published.
* Thanks for making me laugh :)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 20 Oct 2006 10:06:28 +0200
blogging (1-45) life; title=Suhosin is getting packaged
* Monday I blogged about [1 Suhosin] and soon after a discussion popped up
on #debian.de about it and two people discovered they were independently
working on it, but haven't filed ITPs yet. They did so now, and I
subscribed to [2 both] [3 bugs], to follow the progress and test the
package(s) once they are ready. So I can happily concentrate on something
else :)
[1] http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=392119
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=392122
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 12 Oct 2006 12:05:31 +0200
blogging (1-44) life; title=If you are not one of us you dont belong here
* Grummel. First Matthew gets driven away out of Debian, now it seems
people want him to leave our planet. What's next, expulsion? :)
Seriously, I also appreciate it, if people involved in debian (mostly)
write about [1 debian related stuff], but I also think that this itself is
likely to make him become less involved. "Pitty", to phrase it mildly.
* Wondering if I should have chosen "mjg59 for dpl" as title of this post...
[1] http://mjg59.livejournal.com/68112.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 11 Oct 2006 10:26:25 +0200
blogging (1-43) life; title=Geek travel
* More than two and a half months ago, [1 Biella lost her power adapter] in
Zuerich airport. The next day, [2 I found it], but couldn't use it as I
don't have american plugs with me.
* But I was really surprised (but prepared) to see it two months later,
on September the 18th! And this time I took a [3 picture] and used it
happily!
<img src="http://layer-acht.org/poweroutlet.jpg" />
* Unfortunatly last thursday, when I was in Zuerich airport again, it was
gone :-( Even more unfortunatly, I'm back home now ;-)
[1] http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/?p=624
[2] http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/#1-29
[3] http://layer-acht.org/poweroutlet.jpg
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 9 Oct 2006 16:17:23 +0200
blogging (1-42) life; title=Suhosin - php hardened
* I wonder if anyone can give me advice on [1 Suhosin] - a quick search did
not reveal many or rather any howtos or debian packages. Did anyone try to
[2 patch Suhosin] into the current debian php4 or 5 packages and succeeded?
Or does (almost) no one care?
* And yes, I will look at it myself. But I just got curious now and have no
time today. Anybody else interested in getting Suhosin apt-gettable?
[1] http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/
[2] http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/download.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 9 Oct 2006 15:15:09 +0200
blogging (1-41) life; title=debconf6 RC1 dvds available for download
* After Ben [1 announced] the source package to build the debconf6 RC1
dvds, I built them and put them online for you to [2 download].
(The spanish ntsc dvd is currently missing but will be there in 3h.)
* Please give feedback about your experiences with hardware dvd players.
* Thanks again to all people who helped making them possible!
[1] http://womble2.livejournal.com/57867.html
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/dvd/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 4 Oct 2006 15:39:56 +0200
blogging (1-40) life; title=and in the darkness bind them
* So according to Peter Lee, an execute from Disney, [1 we have almost won]
against Digital Restriction Management (DRM). Interestingly five out of six
quotes on that page give good arguments against DRM, even though three of
them are from those people who want to restrict our means to share
culture.
* Please spread the word, why [2 DRM is bad]. This website, http://drm.info
was launched today, on the global day against DRM.
* Unfortunatly winning a battle doesn't mean winning the war. (Sorry for the
military metaphor.) So I'm not surprised [3 software patents are back]
on the agenda in Brussels (linked article in german only) and I do expect
the fight against DRM to be a long one.
[1] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Digital_Rights_Management
[2] http://drm.info/fsfe/why
[3] http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/78834
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 3 Oct 2006 16:56:35 +0200
blogging (1-39) life; title=While my keyboard gently beeps
* I intended to write this blog entry yesterday but then I was having too
much fun with [1 live-package], fai, vservers, munin and other more
serious stuff...
* Let's start with a disclaimer: While I still think that encoding encoded
videos in flash is braindead, I sometimes now happily watch those videos,
which I download through [2 some webservice]. I haven't yet bothered to
play with [3 this command-line tool], simply because I need it less than
once a week... But at least I don't need flash in the browser, mplayer
plays the following videos just fine, but xine based players have problems
with the sound, vlc didn't work at all)...
* Anyway, on saturday I was pointed to "[4 white and nerdy]" which is
completly hillarious, for both the lyrics and the video. And you collect
additional geek-bonuspoints by spotting the error in the formula without
the help of the internet! :)
* Also really awesome is "[5 while my guitar gently weeps]" performed with
an ukulele. This song alone is worth dealing with the flash crap. Copy
kills music?? Hahahaha. The music industry kills music. Culture improves
through "copying" and stays alive through copying.
[1] http://live.debian.net
[2] http://javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php
[3] http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/
[4] http://videodownloader.net/get/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fyoutube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D-xEzGIuY7kw
[5] http://videodownloader.net/get/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fyoutube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D2ZnSquv30ac
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 2 Oct 2006 09:00:59 +0200
blogging (1-38) life; title=AAAAAAAAA!
* [1 AAAAAAAAA] (which BTW I also think about the situation in Debian atm),
my blog or rather it's RSS feed is broken. Please read the last post on
[2 my webpage]. Oh, how I wish to have more time. Could anyone please
propose a GR for the 48h day? ;-)
[1] http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/AAAAAAAAA!
[2] http://layer-acht.org/blog/debian/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 25 Sep 2006 18:58:40 +0200
blogging (1-37) life; title=rather say no without reasons than say nothing
* Unfortunatly currently I don't have as much time as I want to, to share
my thoughts about the dunc tank idea. So all I want to say here, is that I
think that dunc tank in its current form does more harm to the release of
etch than good. The same is also (and maybe even more) true for the long
term effects of it, though of course this depends on how dunc tank will
evolve.
* Six more paragraphs deleted as I was not happy about them. (And I also
have a mail sitting in my draft folder since thursday.) But as said, I'm
short on time atm, RL takes it toll. Unfortunatly.
* I just wish the dunc project would not have been announced like it was
announced last monday. (But I have not yet seen a good proposol how "to
turn back time".) At the moment we only lost seven days in the flames.
So we only have 70 days for a timely release. Which I think is an
important target, but not as important as keeping the technical and
"moral" standards Debian is known for. (And harming *those* would really
hurt debian.) I'm sure sure if we would release etch on february 4th 2007,
most people would still be very impressed (20 month!) and say "Well, not
completly on time. But this is debian, it's released when it's ready, and
2 month late is nothing in the software business".
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 25 Sep 2006 18:29:29 +0200
blogging (1-36) life; title=Get ready for DebConf8
* Whatever date and place is choosen, unfortunatly there always will be
people who will not be able to make it... (Though it would help if those
currently complaining about the (currently only estimated) date for
Debconf7 would propose a workable alternative.)
* But, there is always a next time. So, get ready and [1 propose your venue]
for DebConf8!
[1] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20060920.121711.48c71d08.en.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 20 Sep 2006 14:36:34 +0200
blogging (1-35) life; title=limits.conf and vserver
* If you use vservers and logwatch you probably have seen the following
entry many times: "pam_limits[8987]: setrlimit limit #6 to soft=-1,
hard=-1 failed: Operation not permitted; uid=0 euid=0". Or the same with
#8.
* /etc/security/limit.conf describes "*" as the default entry, but it doesn't
say that this default is valid for all users _but_ root. Arg.
* So with vservers this is what you need to add to limits.conf to get rid
of this log enries:
<pre>
* hard memlock 32
* hard nproc 2048
root hard memlock 32
root hard nproc 2048
</pre>
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 9 Sep 2006 13:21:50 +0200
blogging (1-34) life; title=99 messages
* Yay! I only have 99 "unread" mails in total now! I don't think I have been
there (or even below 1000..) neither in this century nor in the last ten
years... sometimes I have been below 1000 unread mails, but below 100...
long time ago. I really want to get down to 5-20 "unread" mails
"constantly", but not today.
* Fetching new mails now ;-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 19 Aug 2006 14:34:54 +0200
blogging (1-33) life; title=oh blogsoftware
* Another "folded" post which was not intended to be folded. Arg. Will need
to fix or replace it someday... :(
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 25 Jul 2006 13:07:04 +0200
blogging (1-32) life; title=oh memory
* I just came back from buying a pack of floppies and a multimedia-card.
The 10 floppies were 3 euros, the mmc 12e, but it also has 40 times the
capacity. Almost twenty years ago (in 1987 or 88) I bought my first pack
of 3.5 inch floppies, for 80 marks, thats 40 euros now, but taking the
inflation etc. into account I would say it's more like 80e nowadays.
Whatever. I surely hope not to buy floppies ever again. But somehow I
doubt it...
* On a related silly note, a month ago I drove 240km to get hold of an
oldworld G3 mac, to test d-i on it. I wiped the machine but kept its name,
laertes, to keep some memories.
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 25 Jul 2006 11:26:15 +0200
blogging (1-31) life; title=tuxtype and tuxmath updated
* Finally, after 6 month or so, new updated packages for tuxtype and tuxmath
are available. Due to the much appreciated summer heat, I will not go into
more detail, especially as I already [1 announced] this to the debian-edu
mailinglist. Instead I'm going out in the even more appreciated rain now ;-)
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2006/07/msg00077.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 20 Jul 2006 22:11:50 +0200
blogging (1-30) life; title=debconf6 videos "beta release"
* Two month ago we where in the middle of [1 debconf6]... Yesterday I was
kicked out of my bed by a friendly person delivering 36 DVDs with high
quality recordings of the videos [2 we] took there. Yay! And thanks for
sending those over!
* Also thanks to [3 Ben] many (if not all?!) are already available in lower
qualities in the [4 debian meetings archive.].
* Some encodings, an index with better navigation and the slides are still
missing - (help welcome!) - but I felt I should let you know about the
videos which are available now. (Once everything is ready we will send out
a proper announcement.) Enjoy!
[1] http://debconf6.debconf.org/
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/CREDITS
[3] http://womble2.livejournal.com/
[4] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debconf6/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 19 Jul 2006 14:07:46 +0200
blogging (1-29) life; title=perma adaptor - day two
* [1 The power adaptor] Biella left in Zurich airport on sunday, was still
there yesterday :-)
[1] http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/?p=624
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Tue, 18 Jul 2006 12:05:33 +0200
blogging (1-28) life; title=the joys of spam and css
* Unwanted cc:s on debian mailinglists clearly qualifies as "unsolicited bulk
e-mail" for me, aka spam. So from now on I will send personal replies to
those people asking them to stop (because very often people reply to those
emails and keep the cc:s). Also I will keep them in a list of shame. Please,
read your email before sending and include the headers in this reading.
Thanks.
* In completly unrelated news yesterday I finally (after nine month) fixed
the layout of this blog, so you can sensibly read it with a webbrowser as
well. Yay!
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 15 Jul 2006 17:56:55 +0200
blogging (1-27) life; title=three short stories from debconf6
* Unsurprisingly lots of stuff has happened in the last 13 days since I last
blogged. So much, that there were days where I wrote more emails than I
read - and I haven't wrote many...
* Also not unsurprisingly, debconf6 has been/is really a lot of fun - despite
all the problems we have and had. Having met lots of nice people again
(and some for the first time) will be the joyful memories I take home. I
have hoped to be able to do (a little) more debian (not debconf) work, but
well.. it is, as it is. We can and will learn for next years.
* Also I really want to thank all those many people who gave their hands
and/or brains and help get and keep debconf6 running. Muchas gracias!
* Now my three short stories: on tuesday someone on IRC said "AAAARRRRGGG
fucking stream!" and I replied "i'm happy about (bad) status reports, but
'ARRRGG fucking stream' makes me wanna say "streams are optional. STFU!"
which then lead to "well, I didn't mean it that harsh. the streams are
actually pretty cool. just too bad that the connectivity seesm to be to
bad. I'm actually pretty impressed by video and sound quality."
I can understand that people at home get frustrated by interrupted
streams, but we've allways said streams are optional, we do it for the
first time and we had a hell more of problems than we thought off. And
screaming on IRC (over and over) doesn't really make me wanna work harder.
* This morning, some of the power plugs in the main auditorium didn't work.
We then went to the fuse box and everything looked ok. Well, it took us
some time to find out, that this main fuse box had not all fuses for the
big room, there is another fuse box in the audio booth with has fuses for
some (5%) of the power plugs in the main room in the tower. Arg. (Oh, and
in case you wonder, yes, we have asked the hotel staff about this. They
couldn't help.) So one switch of the fuses has moved a little and turned
off. Arrrg. Now it's duct taped and should work till the end of the
conference. Hopefully.
* Story number three is my favorite: someone wanted to have wired access in
the tower so plugged a cable into the hub which goes to the network panel
which link to the network jacks under the table. The small switch we use
has 8 ports and 9 jacks, one extra uplink jack. This broke one out of two
APs in the tower and unfortunatly it was the 802.11g AP to which more
clients can connect. Yay. So far so bad. Then I duct taped the entrance to
the little server room in the audio booth (picture will be uploaded..) and
put up a sign saying noone should enter without coordinated with me.
(BTW, then of course the AP needed some more power cycling to come back to
life, but that's still not the whole story.)
The whole story is that after I duct taped that room completly some
idiot(s) again plugged cables into the switch to get the net working for
him or herself - of course without checking with the videoteam. Thank you
very much! As I we didnt have enough issues already. Luckily this didn't
cause new problems but I'm still shaking my head.
* So, to summarize and to make it clear, I'm not frustrated, just stressed
out, so much that I couldn't even stand people asking me to jump into the
pool after lunch. It was just another request to me and I wanted to
decide for myself what I do in my break. Finally I jumped into the water
and was happy again :-)
* Leaving to formal dinner now without reading this blog post before
sending. Enjoy the food!
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 18 May 2006 17:58:27 -0500
blogging (1-26) life; title=some progress and APs wanted
* the network in Oaxtepec is progressing slowly, we miht have an uplink
tonite or tomorrow... but we'll need more APs, so if you have one, please
bring it along and contact debconf-infrastructure@l.debconf.o - thanks.
* My blog is somewhat broken, I know and I'm sorry, but I cannot help it
atm.
* It's hot here. Really. At 2am it's still warm. Rain might change this
though.
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Fri, 5 May 2006 22:13:06 +0200
blogging (1-25) life; title=debconf6-video and network notes...
* So Jörg has kindly send a request for streaming servers and we got quite a
number of replies yet. Thanks! But... we're absolutly not there yet, so if
you happen to know icecast and be around during debcamp, please help the
video team. (Because we have other things to prepare as well, but we lack
icecast experience the most...)
Also, if someone could prepare a ffmpeg2theora backport from sid to sarge,
this would also help a lot. Actually, it's libavformat-dev (from sid)
which doesnt compile in a sarge environment.
* I brought a debian mirror (plus non-free, contrib, security and volatile)
for i386 and powerpc, co
vering i386, powerpc and sources. If you have an amd64 mirror, please
bring it along.
* I'll stop blogging now and go to actually see Oaxtepec... See you there or
un otra vez :-p
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 4 May 2006 09:57:47 -0500
blogging (1-24) life is good; title=first post!
* /me dances happily and waves from Mexico! Going to dinner now with Gunnar,
Nadezhda, Damog and Sam, then sleeeeeeeeep and then off to Oaxtepec :-)
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 3 May 2006 22:30:19 -0500
blogging (1-23) life is good; title=FOSDEM video DVD with debian talks available
* A [1 prelimnary video DVD] with all talks from the debian developers room
at this years FOSDEM is now available for download. It's called preliminary
because in the final version I would like to include the two missing
talks... (see "extras" on the DVD) - as usual, I happy about feedback!
* For those who care, the script <i>make_pal_dvd.sh</i> is what I've used
to create the DVD.
* On a related note, while uploading the iso I realized that my provider
silently upgraded my dsl line to 50% more bandwidth, yay!!
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/fosdem/dvd/
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Mon, 1 May 2006 13:56:01 +0200
blogging (1-22) life is good; title=Yay!
* The day before yesterday, it was the first warm day of the year here, for
the first time going out in a t-shirt was an option. But yesterday, it was
raining cats and dogs again and I was really annoyed (even in retrospect)
by those who complained about the good weather the day before.
* Today I woke up, the sun shone in my face and it was even warm enough to
go out in a t-shirt in the morning! Yayyay! And in seven days I'll be
waking up in Mexico City, yay yay yay!!!
-- Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> Thu, 27 Apr 2006 10:50:34 +0200
blogging (1-21) life; title=all FOSDEM videos online
* [1 Videos from FOSDEM] are now available for download in four different
encodings and qualities. Enjoy!
* Thanks to [2 Wolfgang Lonien] who pointed me to some nice FOSDEM pictures
which I will use for creating a DVD. It will be released, when... ;-)
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/fosdem/ogg_theora/384x288/
[2] http://wolfgang.lonien.de/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 5 Apr 2006 12:16:38 +0200
blogging (1-20) life; title=FOSDEM video dvd - pics wanted
* To create a nice video DVD from the debian developers room talks I'm
looking for suitable photos as backgrounds for the DVD menus. If you know
of nice FOSDEM group/debian/whatever pictures, please point them to me.
Thanks!
* stupid noentry to workaround a bug in ConveyorBelt
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 3 Apr 2006 10:10:47 +0200
blogging (1-19) life; title=moving and a nice work meeting
* March has been a pretty busy month for me, with much less debian work than
usual. As you can see in [1 these photos] it also has been exceptionally
much snow in Hamburg...
* Two weeks ago I started moving within the flat into my new [2 quiet and sunny room]
yay! One day later I lost net access at home, also because of moving :(
Luckily I only had to wait twelve days to get back online. I spent most of
them renovating, moving and reorganzing stuff and then was too tired in
the evenings, when I went online at friends, to do much useful stuff.
<img src="http://layer-acht.org/fotos/winter in march and moving/100_1048_pre.jpg"/>
* Right now it's 3.30am, the [3 debian-edu ftpmaster meeting] is almost
over and in an hour we'll leave the house to go to the fish market which
will start at 5am :) <b>Update:</b> it's 7.30 now, we're back, fish market
was very much fun and there are some more fotos online now.
* This week(end) has been pretty much fun and got me back into doing
debian(-edu) work, although at the moment I'm too tired to properly write
this blog entry. Good $timeoftheday!
[1] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/winter%20in%20march%20and%20moving/"
[2] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/winter%20in%20march%20and%20moving/100_1048_Med.jpg.127.html
[3] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/debian-edu-ftpmaster-meeting/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 2 Apr 2006 03:20:47 +0200
blogging (1-18) life; title=videos from the fosdem debian developers room
* Two hours after I blogged about having no camera I got one :-) Being
hit by #350333 I had to reboot another kernel anyway, so I decided to
try a newer one, namely 2.6.16-rc5, to see if that bug is fixed there.
It is, but I got hit by yaird bug #352010 when I installed it. Fun :-)
Especially because Jonas provided a fixed yaird quickly...
* Oh Shock and horror! The videos show ugly artefacts! The grabbed files and
on the cameras lcd, though they disappear on the lcd, when I unplugg
the firewire cable. Strange! p2-mate suggested electrical interference as
the cause and was right. Using different power-outlets for the notebook
and the camera made the artefacts go away. Oh joy!
* To end a long story quickly: [1 Here they are]!
* For yet unknown reasons these ogg theora files play well in vlc, kaffeine,
xine and totem, but not so in (my version of) mplayer.
* Better quality oggs are being encoded and uploaded atm, followed by xvid
files (highest quality) and mpeg2s (for producing a video DVD).
* The forth talk, "The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port" by Aurelien Jarno was
recorded in HDV and will be released soon... Due to circumstances beyond
our control, the video team failed in recording "Women in Free Software:
Findings from FLOSSPOLS"... Luckily an audio recording was made, which
hopefully can be made available once the study quoted by Halla Wallach
is published.
* Currently only four out of ten slides are available. Pointers welcome!
* My other notices about FOSDEM still need to published :-) When (or if?)
I find time...
* And finally, I succeeded in producing my [2 first video DVD], yay! The DVD
contains all videos from the debian-edu/skolelinux gathering in January in
Erkelenz. Since it was made with [3 webdvd], which Ben Hutching wrote
after producing the debconf5 videos, I think I can have reasonable good
confidence that this DVD will also work in most standalone DVD players.
* Now I'll take a break and go out to enjoy the snow landscape in mid march :-)
Even though I'm real busy atm (video was only number three of my current
priorities) it's important to take a break and relax once in a while.
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/fosdem/ogg_theora/384x288/
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debian-edu-erkelenz/dvd/
[3] http://womble.decadentplace.org.uk/software/webdvd/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 11 Mar 2006 15:08:22 +0100
blogging (1-17) life; title=video details...
* "A single-layer DVD can store 4.7 GB (4.38 GiB, or 4,707,000,000 Bytes)"
(taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD)
* The [1 preliminary DVD.iso-image] made from the videos from Erkelenz is
4870586368 bytes. Oh well, need to encode the mpegs again, with just a
little lower bitrate...
* Do you know about the "--si" option of ls ? Now I do.
* Licences are no fun. See the thread on debian-legal and debconf-video.
Actually, given unlimited time, I think, licence discussions could be fun.
* Out of those five friends which could borrow me a DV camera, two now only
have broken cameras, two are unreachable and the other cam is busy. Oh
well. (I need a camera to grab those FOSDEM videos lying on my desk.)
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debian-edu-erkelenz/dvd/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 9 Mar 2006 13:02:38 +0100
blogging (1-16) life; title=after victory is before victory
* Well, the title might be a little too optimistic, s/victory/battle/ if you
prefer. Surely the next battle against software patents (not only) in Europe
is coming up.
* In case you haven't heard about it yet, visit the
[1 nosoftwarepatents-awards]. Each month five (software) patents will be
presented, which were issued despite the law prohibiting software
patents and despite (formal) protests against them.
This month features such highlights as a "centralized database" and a
"context menu".
The idea is to show, that a.) software patents exists (despite patent
advocators claiming they don't) and b.) what a sheer nonsense such are.
* BTW, [2 your webshop is also patented], in case you didn't know. Selling over
the network, paying with credit cards, sending offers after requests ? All
patented. Shut down your business now ;-)
[1] http://www.nosoftwarepatents-award.com
[2] http://webshop.ffii.de/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 2 Mar 2006 13:50:19 +0100
blogging (1-15) life; title=old meetings-archive stuff first...
* Finally, all the [1 mpeg2 videos from Erkelenz] fit on a single
single-sided dvd! Once the DVD is actually done, I'll inform you here
(and on the debian-edu mailninglist).
* No news on the fosdem videos yet. Currently I'm looking for a DV cam to
borrow, so I can copy the tapes to hard drive... nonetheless I expect the
encoded videos to be online before the DPL voting period starts...
Oh, FOSDEM was a lot of fun, many thanks to everybody who contributed to it
:-) My own report is somewhat pending - damn work and additionally I
catched a little cold also.
* Joey Schulze informed me today about an english version of his
[2 debian security paper] from [3 Linuxtag 2005].
* The RFC in my blog for a better licence for video works was answered with
two suggestions: MJ Ray suggested a specially reworded
[4 Creative Commons licence], while some folks from the #debian.de
channels were in favor of the [5 artistic licence]. I'm somewhat in favor
of the artistic licence, too, as I think it's easier to understand than a
special edition of a CC licence.
Another suggestion was not to embed the name of the licence in the video
files, but the URL for the licence choosen. Beginning with the FOSDEM
videos I'll do that.
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debian-edu-erkelenz/mpeg/
[2] http://www.infodrom.org/~joey/Vortraege/2005-06-23/
[3] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/linuxtag-karlsruhe/debianday/
[4] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/scotland/
[5] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license.php
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Thu, 2 Mar 2006 13:23:12 +0100
blogging (1-14) life; title=licence stuff and 2nd release of the debian-edu videos from Erkelenz
* The [1 videos] from the Skolelinux meeting in Erkelenz have been updated,
you'll find the old and new script I've used for encoding there as well.
The most important changes are: no low quality mpegs anymore, only ogg
theoras, this time in mono also. Better quality mpeg2 videos to be used
for a DVD, though I fear a little bit that I have to redo them, as they
are 4.9GB in total, which might just be a little too big to fit on one
DVD.
Maybe you want to give [2 webdvd] a try (which has just been updated by
Ben) and report back the results ?
* For the first time the videos themselves contain a copyright and author
note. From FOSDEM on I would like to switch to the [3 open content licence]
- please speak up now, if you think that's unwise or unreasonable.
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debian-edu-erkelenz/
[2] http://womble.decadentplace.org.uk/software/webdvd/
[3] http://opencontent.org/opl.shtml
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 22 Feb 2006 11:33:29 +0100
blogging (1-13) life; title=lost slides and videos on meetings-archive.d.n
* [1 Philipp], Joeys "slides" are published on [2 meetings-archive.debian.net]
and I now have informed Wolfgang that he can update his page. Unfortunatly
Joey's paper is written in german...
* Also the round of introductions from the [3 QA meeting] in Darmstadt is
now online (because of rsync-times you'll only be able to see it in three
hours). I did not publish it earlier, because someone said something which
should remain private. Instead of saying this in advance, so that the
recording could have been stopped, this remark was made after saying these
things, and therefore required post-processing.
Then it took me three months until I finally looked at that video to edit
it. What I saw made me speechless (and smile), the video was already
edited! But as nobody told me that, I didn't know :-) Or maybe I was told
this when leaving Darmstadt, but it didn't reach my memory...
Now, about four weeks later, I got over my embarrassment not looking at
it earlier...
[1] http://blog.philkern.de/archives/131-Stable-security-updates.html
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/linuxtag-karlsruhe/debianday/
[3] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/qa-meeting-darmstadt/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 17 Feb 2006 15:55:38 +0100
blogging (1-12) life; title=Videos of DebianEdu meetings and others
* [1 Videos from the Skolelinux meeting in Erkelenz] last weekend are now
available for your viewing pleasure in four different qualities in three
codecs. Now playing: [2 The final countdown] - Enjoy :-)
* [3 The exact script I used to create them] from the raw dv files (one was
hdv) will be available at the same place as the videos in a few hours. I
would be happy to hear comments on the tools and options I've used. Of
course other feedback is welcome too!
* If there are suggestions for improvements, the files will change again. So
before mirroring everything you should probably wait a month or two. I do
not expect any later changes :-)
* Almost all slides are missing at the moment, if you gave a talk and used
slides, please mail them together with source and a suitable licence file
to me.
* And again: Thanks to our hosts from the [4 Cornelius Burgh Gymnasium]!
You've done a great job! Also many thanks to those of you who operated the
camera! Knowing this works so well, I've now decided to do videos of the
talks in the [5 debian developers room at FOSDEM] as well... again, this
will only be possible with your support!
* "BTW", if you're into live streaming, and would like to see live streams
of debconf6, get in contact *NOW*. What we lack at most, is someone who
knows an easy to setup solution, which works with dv input streams, encodes
them and pipes them into some external streaming server. We'll only have
a small uplink in Mexico, so we need to distribute them from another
machine (which we have). What we also don't have, is time to research such
a setup ourselves. If you want to help, please join #debconf-video on
freenode or send a mail to the [6 debconf video mailinglist].
[1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2006/debian-edu-erkelenz
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-edu/2006/02/msg00026.html
[3] http://layer-acht.org/encode_all.sh
[4] http://www.cbg-erkelenz.de/
[5] http://www.fosdem.org/2006/index/dev_room_debian
[6] http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/mindex/debconf-video%4020060101.000000.00000000.en.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 4 Feb 2006 15:20:57 +0100
blogging (1-11) life; title=Kernel 2.4 for etch or not
* This is a blog entry I wanted to write for about six weeks now, but I
was busy with other stuff. In December 2005 I got curious why 2.4.32
wasn't packaged for Debian and investigated the situation a bit.
There are several reasons why 2.4 is still interesting:
- Kernel 2.6 is still a moving target...
- Some hardware is only supported with 2.4, for example older laptops
which need APM and don't work with ACPI. Also some non-i386 machines.
- According to popcon, 6-7% of the i386 users have a kernel-2.4 image
installed.
* Unfortunatly, nobody from the kernel team is really interested in
working on 2.4 anymore. They do security fixes for the 2.4 kernels
in woody and sarge, for which I'm very thankful, but that's about it.
Even though 2.4 is moving very slowly nowadays (mostly security updates,
very seldom new drivers are including), this is more work than needed,
because every fix needs to be backported to 2.4.27 (and 2.4.18 for woody).
* Of course there are some issues which need to be taken into consideration
when thinking about whether it's worthwhile to have 2.4.3x in Etch:
- it needs gcc-3.3 to compile, gcc-4.0 won't work. Period. So gcc-3.4 also
needs to supported during etch's lifetime - which will be something like
2009 when etch+1 will become oldstable (by current release cycles)...
- it's not sensible to have powerpc and amd64 flavors, and probably
others. So this kernel package will not be arch any. (Which is not
really a problem, but unusual.)
- Both kernel 2.4 and 2.6 contain non-free firmware and drivers. I
seriously doubt people want to deal with this issue and solve it for
2.4. For 2.6 it will be done, but for 2.4 ? As I see it, this is the
biggest showstopper for 2.4 in etch, I would be happy to be proven
wrong. As a starting point, you can look at this [1 investigation]
by Bill Allombert about the the situation in 2.4.25.
Removing those files would be an option, but maybe we can also "borrow a
better solution" from 2.6...?!
- if 2.4.32 or .33 shall be used in d-i/g-i, work on this integration
needs to be started real soon now.
I have done some work on creating a linux-2.4.32 package which is based on
the new kernel packaging. I got busy with videos for debconf-es2, so I
didn't finish and commit this.
Horms made a [2 presentation] about the kernel packaging in debian for LCA
and gave two options: a.) support and backport fixes for 2.4.27 or b.) go
with 2.4.32. Somehow he did not consider the option of dropping 2.4 even
if he calls it legacy ;-)
Besides technical reasons (security fixes handled by upstream, some driver
updates and very few new ones) I think we should not forget that most
people have no idea that 2.4.27 in debian is far closer to 2.4.32 than to
.27, and therefore will think debian ships an outdated 2.4 kernel. So I
think we should simply go for 2.4.3x, if it is sensible to support 2.4 in
etch at all.
It "just" needs to be done, and I volunteer to do it (with the help of the
kernel team, the porters and anybody else who wants to join), if this work
will not be in vain.
Please send comments to the [3 debian-kernel-mailinglist], where I posted
this blog entry before. Thanks.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/04/msg00074.html
[2] http://www.vergenet.net/linux/debian_kernel/
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-kernel/2006/01/msg00742.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 29 Jan 2006 00:31:50 +0100
blogging (1-10) life; title=splashy backport for sarge
* Since I prefer quiet and relaxing work environments, I don't like to see
the kernel boot messages if I'm not debugging something. So saturday I've
installed [1 splashy] on my laptop.
As I couldn't find backported packages for sarge anywhere, not even on the
[2 skolelinux wiki] (which explains the usage of splashy and is targeted at
sarge (fixed now)) I've built them myself and provide them on [3 my webpage]
to save other people from rebuilding them again and again.
I've asked to include them on backports.org but it's (not yet written)
policy only accepts packages from unstable not from experimental. So no
luck for now.
* For other people's reference I use the following as kernel params for
splashy on a R51 notebook: video=radeonfb:1024x768-32@100 vga=795
[1] http://splashy.alioth.debian.org
[2] http://www.skolelinux.de/wiki/RalfGesellensetter/Splashy
[3] http://layer-acht.org/splashy/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 23 Jan 2006 11:58:34 +0100
blogging (1-9) life; title=On workrave and workplaces
* Thanks to [1 David Pashley] I have discovered [2 workrave], a tool with
the aim to help you prevent RSI. I find it really useful, though in the
beginning it sometimes feels annoying, for example when you're in the middle
of doing something. After two days of using it, I'm slowly changing my habbit
of clicking on the "postpone" button in those cases, as this a.) leads to
another interrupt soon and b.) means even more finger movements (to click
on the button and getting back to work).
Taking the breaks as adviced (I've only changed the defaults slightly)
is really relaxing in my experience and even if I'm in the middle of
doing something, I don't loose my concentration if I pause for 25 seconds
and relax. I do loose more of my concentration if I do use the postpone
or skip button :-)
And it's also not only helping preventing RSI but also back pains (which
are related in my opinion / experience as one of the core causes for RSI
is bad posture which also leads to back pains) and those breaks also help
not to forget to eat and drink, which sometimes happens during hacking
sessions.
So I'm a happy workrave user now, even though I'm still annoyed by
[3 bug 348845] - which I would happily fix myself if the sources for the
images were available...
* Which brings me to the topic of content being unsuitable for "the"
workplace, because it [4 offends people]. I am offended, but not really
surprised, how many people (and workplaces) seem to be offended by
mentioning lesbians, but not for [5 sensible reasons] but because of the
sexual reference. Heck, even [6 Microsofts CEO] seems to happily get
along with gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders even though
Microsoft as an american company has to fear those (christian) talibans,
which is not the case for Debian.
And you really shouldn't blame anybody else except yourself if you visit
non-work related URLs during your working hours.
[1] http://www.davidpashley.com/cgi/pyblosxom.cgi/2006/01/19#unintended-consequences
[2] http://packages.debian.org/stable/gnome/workrave
[3] http://bugs.debian.org/348845
[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/01/msg00975.html
[5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2006/01/msg00985.html
[6] http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/stories/2005/04/23/steveBallmersEmailAboutAntidiscriminationBill.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 22 Jan 2006 17:25:10 +0100
blogging (1-8) life; title=debconf-es 2 videos available
* The videos from [1 debconf.es 2] are now [2 online] (actually they will be
at 18 UTC). Which is good and makes me happy...
* But there are still some problems, so you should not mirror them (yet):
1. The low quality mpegs are a too big for my taste.
2. The good quality oggs have too low quality.
3. The kde talk is only available encoded with xvid, and nothing else.
Expect high quality xvids of all talks and a mpg/ogg version of the kde
talk soon.
4. I have no idea [3 what this is] - any hints welcome.
5. ATM the slides are "only" available on www.debian.org.es not yet on
meetings-archive.debian.net
* I very much appreciate feedback, esp. on the following topics:
1. During some talks there is quite a lot of zooming, is that good or bad?
2. Due to the camera position, some people in the audience could only be
captured from the back (while they are talking). Is that good or bad ?
3. A better licence for this kind of stuff
4. The filenames: Should they contain a chronological number of the talk ?
Spanish filenames might also be better/nicer, feel free to send me a
translated list ;-)
5. For all talks - except the kde talk - ffmpeg and ffmpeg2theora were used
for encoding. (BTW, anybody knows another theora encoder? ffmpeg2theora is
slllllllow.) For some strange reasons this didn't work for the kde talk,
so I've used mencoder for it. Maybe I should upload the 12GB raw-dv file
of the kde talk as well, so people can debug this ?
* The exact command lines I've used are documented on my [4 video page] -
this page is pretty much work in progress and will be updated as I find
better solutions for the above mentioned problems.
* Debconf-es 2 happened a month ago. When asked back then, I gave today as
the ultimate release day. Then my life has become much busier than expected,
and as a result the videos are in this unfinished state. Do you appreciate them
being released like this today or do you think I should have released them
when they are ready ? (Which might be in two weeks or more as I'm still very
busy. IMO it's good to have them (even in bad quality only (at first))
ASAP.
[1] http://www.debian.org.es/debconf-es2/charlas.html
[2] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/debconf-es-2/
[3] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/debconf-es-2/ogg_theora/720x576/whatsthis.ogg
[4] http://layer-acht.org/video/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 16 Jan 2006 15:25:15 +0100
blogging (1-7) life; title=In case you are running OpenWRT
* In case you are running OpenWRT, specifically [1 White Russian RC4], and
your root password is reset after a reset or a power-cycle (and telnet is
also enabled again), then you need to boot into failsafe-mode, execute
"mtd unlock linux" and "jffs2root --clean" as root and reboot. Maybe this
is useful for someone, at least I couldn't find this info on the web...
[1] http://downloads.openwrt.org/whiterussian/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Mon, 16 Jan 2006 14:52:09 +0100
blogging (1-6) life; title=I love statistics
* [1 arrrrrrrgggghhhh] !
[1] http://osteele.com/words/aargh
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sat, 14 Jan 2006 01:00:15 +0100
blogging (1-5) life; title=happy 0x7d6 - some news from 0x7d5
* Gnarf: itentional repost to get the URLs right. Dammit :-]
* 2nd post :) I'm really curious where this will lead to... probably I
should just write more and care less. OTOH, this will be on the net
(somewhere there..) for eternity :)
* my pictures from [1 debconf.es 2] in December 2005 and [2 debconf5] in
July 2005 are finally online. Many thanks to Amaya for creating this fancy
hackergotchi out of them!
* debconf.es 2 videos are now being worked on.
* In the end of december I went to [3 22C3] and had lots of fun and insights
there. For the first time the congress was spawned over four days (instead
of three the years before), which lead to a much more relaxed conference
(no talks before noon and somewhat less crowded schedule), though in the
end it was still too much information to proceed properly ;)
The CCC's conference management system, [4 pentabarf], has been rewritten
from scratch in ruby on rails - and IMO it already rocked when it was
written in PHP. I guess I will have to take a closer look again..
The video team collected 400GB of data on 200 DV tapes. So now they'll have
"some" work to do: only a few talks are already available online, most are
not (more than 100 talks), and all need to be encoded properly. This is
unfortunate for the audience (they'll have to wait) and a lot of work for
the people doing it. For debconf6 we should aim to release as many videos
as possible during the conference. So IMO streaming is purely optional
and should only be done if a.) the video team consists of a sufficient
number of people and b.) we have prepared this really well. You're welcome
to help!
* Oh, I almost forgot: that conference had better connectivity than Africa!
That's 10 GB/s. Which really doesn't say much about the conference - your
ISP might have more - but it does say a lot about the continents and its
peoples situation.
[1] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/debconf.es%202/
[2] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/debconf5%20in%20HEL/
[3] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/wiki/22C3_Public_Wiki
[4] http://pentabarf.org/
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Wed, 4 Jan 2006 20:04:20 +0100
blogging (1-4) life; title=hola planet
* Hello World. As you can see, my blog is now on planet.d.o as well. /me
waves :)
* I'm writing this during the final minutes of debconf-es-2, which I
enjoyed quite a lot. Thanks to everyone who made this another fun Debian
event! Quite unsurprinsingly, I couldn't get as much done as I thought
previously. What I did manage to do, is to add more stuff to my todo list:
I will be taking home a bunch of DV tapes with the recordings of the [1 talks]
given. I'll send a note, when they're available online.
[1] http://www.debian-es.org/debconf-es2/horarios.html
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 18 Dec 2005 17:42:23 +0100
blogging (1-3) life; title=about blogging and websites and stuff
* So it has been almost a month since the last time I wrote stuff here.
The burden to write something more or less regulary is one of the
reasons why I'm still not sure if I want to have a blog.
One reason for me to have a blog would be to be able to answer to other
peoples blogs - although I'm not sure if this is a good reason as most
blogs allow comments...
* The website looks better now and I've also improved some content.
Still I'm not really happy about it - but at least I'm not unhappy
about it anymore.
* Next thing I'll do is update the FAI stuff. "Unfortunatly" I got sucked
into playing with [1 asterisk], which took and takes some of my time but
it's also lots of fun and useful to have running.
[1] http://www.asterisk.org
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 4 Nov 2005 14:37:40 +0100
blogging (1-2) life; title=Linuxhotel and gallery available
* I've attended a automatic installation workshop in the [1 Linuxhotel] in
Essen. Even though I suffered from fever it was fun, as we finally set up
a [2 group development process] for [3 FAI], splitted the fai package
into a few more packages and prepared a multi-arch fai kernels package.
* Also I played with [4 bins] a bit and put some [5 photos] of the event
online.
[1] http://www.linuxhotel.de
[2] http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/index.php/Fai_subversion_howto
[3] http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai
[4] http://packages.debian.org/bins
[5] http://layer-acht.org/fotos/linuxhotel
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Sun, 9 Oct 2005 14:46:05 +0200
blogging (1-1) life; title=First post
* First post with Romain Francoise's [1 debian changelog blogging software] :-)
[1] http://orebokech.com/debian/#1-1
-- Holger Levsen <debian@layer-acht.org> Fri, 7 Oct 2005 23:29:11 +0200
