Today I visited the DebConf 8 website, and was "dreaming" (yes, that's right, dreaming..) about going there. I actually made a flight plan for DebConf -- this might be useful for anyone living in Sicily/Southern Italy who wants to go there. Obviously, my starting airport would be Palermo Falcone-Borsellino (PMO), YMMV.

Unfortunately, the travel is about 29 hours, with a total cost of more than € 1.000,00. That is, just to get there. And I didn't consider any kind of accommodation. But, well, Argentina is not that close to Italy, is it?

I hope next year's DebConf will be held somewhere nearer to me -- Europe?

I'm currently experimenting with ports of the Debian system other than x86 using Qemu. This is what I currently have installed/am installing:

• Debian GNU/Linux on MIPS
• Debian GNU/kFreeBSD on x86

More details will follow about these setups, as soon as I get some time.

I actually plan to play more with qemu (disk space and time permitting), to install (and well, try), these other ports:

• Debian GNU/Linux on MIPSEL
• Debian GNU/Linux on ARM
• Debian GNU/Linux on Sparc
• Debian GNU/Linux on PowerPC
• Debian GNU/Hurd on x86
• possibly, other ports of Debian.

Just bookmark this page... and come visit sometimes!

Here you can find some information about my x86 virtual machine running Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

# uname -a
GNU/kFreeBSD kfreebsd 6.3-1-486 #0 Thu Mar  6 01:51:33 CET 2008 i686 i386 Intel(R) Celeron(R) M CPU 530  @ 1.73GHz GNU/kFreeBSD
# cat /proc/cpuinfo 
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 14
model name      : Intel(R) Celeron(R) M CPU 530  @ 1.73GHz
stepping        : 3
flags           : fpu de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep pge cmov pat mmx fxsr xmm b26
cpu MHz         : 1810.31
bogomips        : 1810.31
# ifconfig
ed0: flags=8843 mtu 1500
        inet6 fe80::5054:ff:fe12:3456%ed0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1 
        inet 192.168.1.71 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
        ether 52:54:0:12:34:56
        media: Ethernet 10baseT/UTP 
lo0: flags=8049 mtu 16384
        inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 
        inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2 
        inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000 
# mount
/dev/ad0s1a on / (ufs, local)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
linprocfs on /proc (linprocfs, local, noexec, nosuid)
# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1a           4.9G  259M  4.3G   6% /
devfs                 1.0K  1.0K     0 100% /dev
linprocfs             4.0K  4.0K     0 100% /proc
#

I'll be mainly using this machine to help porting Debian to the kFreeBSD kernel (or, well, to port my packages, in first instance).

A quick installation guide will (hopefully) soon be available!

From yesterday evening, this site is now running thanks to Drupal, a Content Management System (CMS) which I believe more flexible and complete than Wordpress. All the old articles and archives aren't lost (I've made a backup before hacking ), but it'll take a while before I figure out how to correctly import nearly 3 years of articles into Drupal. Stay tuned!

Finally, today gthumb 2.11.0 (3:2.11.0~svn2319-1) first appeared on Debian systems. It's a SVN snapshot from svn.gnome.org, so don't expect much stability, even though it is not that unstable as one may think, but upstream hasn't released it yet, so I preferred putting it into experimental. It'll start being very unstable when the port to gio begins.

gthumb 2.11.0 has much many new features with regard to gthumb 2.10.x series. First of all, it uses libexiv2 instead of libexif, thus allowing for much more image-metadata (EXIF) manipulation than now. Please, please, please. Test the new package. To do so, and you haven't ever installed anything from experimental, here are some instructions:

1. add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list: deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main
2. update your packages list: # apt-get update
3. install gthumb from experimental: # apt-get -t experimental install gthumb

Today a new version of john (a.k.a. John The Ripper) has landed on Debian. Enjoy!

Today is a great day. I've officially had an AM assigned: this means that my way to becoming a Debian Developer has started!

Today I've been triaging bugs for bash-completion... what a mess! I've been tagging, closing bugs, applying patches, trying to do my best... and it seems like I've lowered the bugs count a bit. Enjoy a cleaner bash-completion! (well, when it'll be released, that is )

Time has come for me to do something serious for Debian

I must say I'm not a C programmer -- everything I did comes from general knowledge of C, trial-and-error, some general concepts I have. Thus, the code I'm attaching here is likely to be buggy.

I'd like that, who feels a bit adventurous, applies the patch to acpi-0.09 (the current Debian version), to see if it works for him. As already happened, for someone it did not work, so I fixed it a bit.

I hope you know how to patch sources... don't you?

Please report any failure/missing information to Debian Bug #462305, by sending a mail to 462305@bugs.debian.org (or, well, comment this post...).

Thanks!

I'm adopting libnet for Debian, and the old maintainer didn't do a good job with filling debian/copyright with the right information. In fact, he only completed the information for the upstream author of the package, but didn't do anything to check whether the other pieces composing this software contained other copyright notices... and, well, there are. Lots. And, well, also different licenses.

I'm now getting kinda sad about this. I did a lot of work to get the information completed right, and was having a problem with the definition of a couple of licenses (whether they were DFSG-free or not). I've then asked to my usual sponsor, which is also my AM. And, well, he took those issues into the NM process. Well, I know this is his "job" as my AM, and he does this to guarantee I'll be (if ever) the best DD I can. But, well, I was looking for a wise suggestion from an experienced developer, and didn't want my mails to be put on trial for NM. I'm just mad at this.

I hope everything will go well for my NM, after this request for help to my sponsor.

UPDATE Jun 10, 2008: my sponsor sent me a mail replying to a question like "I hope this won't compromise my NM", saying that he's still confident that I can become an excellent DD. Wow

*[AM]: Application Manager *[NM]: New Maintainer *[DD]: Debian Developer

Ingo, I believe that we didn't need any page like the one you're pointing at. Just a "warning banner" on the homepage would've done the trick -- oh, well, those machines are developer-oriented (be them DDs or maintainers), so I believe that a more verbose post on -devel would have been sufficient.

But, well, this is IMHO, and IANADD.

Lucas did a very good job: he successfully integrated part of Ubuntu package management with Debian's. As explained in his blog, he took all the data from Launchpad and made a SQLite database with the fetched data. Now we have a "Ubuntu" column in the Debian Developer Packages Overview pages, and also a nice "Ubuntu box" in the PTS pages (see example).

This is really useful: in fact, I've just integrated two patches for john, which were filed in Ubuntu's Launchpad -- and we would probably never have had them in Debian.

Lucas' work will surely improve the collaboration between Ubuntu and Debian maintainers, and this will give end-users improved software... enjoy FOSS advantages!

I've recently installed [PulseAudio][0] (why should I switch to it?), and suddenly all embedded flash movies (YouTube, for example), got muted (oh, well, my browsers also started crashing...). This post is about making those movies work with PulseAudio

[0]: http://www.pulseaudio.org/ "PulseAudio homepage This is not original content. The original author is Mrbigshot08 on forums.debian.net, but I'm posting a more Debianist way to do what he explains.

1. download the source package:

   $ wget http://pulseaudio.vdbonline.net/flashplugin-nonfree-pulse_0.1~000.tar.gz

2. install the needed packages to build a proper Debian package:

   # apt-get install devscripts pbuilder

3. extract the source and cd into it:

   $ tar zxvf flashplugin-nonfree-pulse_0.1~000.tar.gz
   $ cd flashplugin-nonfree-pulse_0.1~000/

4. satisfy the package dependencies:

   # /usr/lib/pbuilder/pbuilder-satisfydepends

5. start the build:

   $ debuild

6. if everything went fine, cd into the upper directory, and install the package:
   

   $ cd ..
   
   

   dpkg -i flashplugin-nonfree-pulse_0.1~000_*.deb

7. remove things we installed no more needed:

   # apt-get --purge remove devscripts pbuilder

Also, time for some legalese bloat:

I do not take any responsibility for any problem this procedure might cause to your system / computer. These instructions are provided "AS IS", and any express or implied warranties are disclaimed. In no event shall I be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use, data, or profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of these instructions, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.

I've finally added my dh_bash-completion script to bash-completion, and fixed the RELEASE number. Hopefully it will soon be released (tomorrow?) -- it actually fixes 23 bugs filed in the Debian BTS. Wow!

Bash-Completion would eventually need to be totally re-written: we are planning to make it modular in some way, mainly to reduce the loading time on login.

Today I've found this on xkcd.com:

The funny thing is: today I should be in open sea.... wow!

Here's a map letting you see this algorithm in action. People on my graticule: let's meet someday!

Here's what someone posted on it.comp.os.linux.iniziare (an Italian newsgroup for Linux neophites).... goosh stands for Google shell. And yes, it really behaves like a unix-shell. Try typing "login" and, if you happen to have a GMail account, you'll end up having something like:

d.paleino@goosh.org:/web> _

blinking at you.

He (Stefan Grothkopp, the author of goosh.org) must be a shell-lover... I love his website too now

Imagine how would that be fancy to do your searches typing "web foo"... very hackish, indeed!

Sorry Joss, I'm going back to FireFox.

I've been a happy user of Epiphany-Gecko for more than a year, I admit, but right now it has become too buggy. Yes, it's gecko's fault, I know, but it became unusable at all.

And Epiphany-Webkit isn't that better. It has lots of bugs, and missing important functionalities (i.e. the recent "Open in New Tab doesn't work"-bug...).

I'm going back to Firefox. Version 3 opens up very fast on my laptop. I admit I am a bit lost -- I'll miss something of Epiphany (for example, the ability of adding "custom" search fields on top -- I had one for the BTS...).

I'll probably revert to Epiphany, sure. But that will take some time, unfortunately . I know the developers have announced they'll completely switch to webkit, but in the meanwhile, I'll stick with Firefox.

Today I switched from Xfce to LXDE: the first impression is: wow.

It's really fast, and it seems lacking no functionality from what I had on Xfce (probably some, but I just installed it like 10 minutes ago, and I still need to find out all its potentialities ).

It's based on OpenBox as window manager, which was originally derived from BlackBox. Since version 3.0, it has no code from BlackBox anymore

I'll post my impressions after some use... I really like it -- I always preferred speed over beauty.