therning.org/ magnus

Why doesn’t Ubuntu OpenWeek have a session explaining free?

It seems my Debian packages for Epilicious have worked in Ubuntu (Dapper Drake I suppose). This is purely accidental. It’s however a very nice accident This lucky coincidence doesn’t hold for Edgy Eft.

If you are lucky then you can get my Epilicious packages to work on Edgy Eft by copying (or linking) the files to /usr/lib/epiphany/2.16/extension. No guarantees, and YMMV, of course.

Related news: I’ve just updated the package of the development edge version of Epilicious.

The only really bad thing with Ubuntu is that they release every 6 months. This means that every 6 months the web is flodded with articles about installing Ubuntu; articles about what’s good, articles about what’s bad, articles about how to fix what’s bad and thereby showing that Ubuntu still is good, articles about upgrading, articles about installing on a clean system, articles about Ubuntu chaning lives, articles about how installing Ubuntu saves a kitten…

If this continues the web will become useless. Seriously, it will!

It’s been hard to avoid the whole Dunc-Tank debacle that’s been going on in Debian for a while now. I can’t say I care a whole lot, but after reading the position statement posted by a few DDs I got to thinking.

At about the time of Warty Warthog I jumped on the Ubuntu band wagon. I had been using Debian for a few years already. Becoming a DD was something I thought was worth persuing, but it was hard work. I didn’t even find anyone to upload my packages. Disappointment struck and I jumped ship. In Ubuntu I found a new community, a community that was growing and actively supported people who were interested in contributing. Due to circumstances I couldn’t put in as much work as I wanted and I still had that nagging feeling that to really contribute, even to Ubuntu, I needed to contribute to Debian. After all Ubuntu is a fork of Debian. There was also a kind of built-in inequality in Ubuntu. There were first-rate citizens and second-rate citizens. First-rate citizens were employed by Canonical. In the end my Ubuntu days ended during Breezy and I went back to Debian. There were several reasons for my switch back, but one was that in Debian everyone is equal. You can go as far as you want in Debian, you just have to put in the work. It is a meritocracy.

So, where do my thoughts on DT come? Well, here it is; DT threatens that equality. Debian runs the risk of becoming a project with tiered membership. Luckily the members are vocal, opinionated, and not afraid of using their MUAs. I still have trust in Debian. We live and we learn.

The basic idea of DT (paying people to work on Debian) isn’t all bad but maybe they should have let the DDs elect who gets paid to work on Debian? Or maybe it should be run similar to Google’s summer of code, with project proposals and DDs electing projects worth investing in?

In the end, what do I know? I’m not even a DD.

I enjoyed reading this article on how an XSS attack works. I’ve always just done the alert("Game over!") XSS which isn’t really an attack at all, just a proof that there’s a possibility for an attack.

That trusted computing is bad for consumers is something I’ve known for a while, but apparently TC is bad for security as well. Every security measure has its side effects, I’m not convinced this one is unintended though.

Here’s a prime example of just how bad laws like DMCA can be. If this holds up we basically allow the law to force us backwards in time. (I just have to sneak in Cory’s excellent write-up on Europe’s broadcasting flag here.)

Network neutrality is a complicated subject. Ed Felten has done a lot lately to clarify things for me with his Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality. I still have to find the time to look through his blog a bit more carefully.

Why is this such big news? An update for Ubuntu broke X. Boohoo! I bet most people complaining don’t have a shadow of a leg to stand on in this. They don’t pay, they don’t contribute, they only bitch in the forums/mailinglists/blogs/etc. It only took 8 hours to fix!

Just in case the UK government wants a good reason to not introduce bloody ID cards and national databases to keep records of everything everyone does—here it is!

Looking to replace M$ Office? Here are a few MS Office killers.

I wouldn’t mind having my desktop look like this!

I’ve actually wondered how to uniquify a list in Python for a long time.

Python is moving up, or maybe it’s down, I don’t know.

Want to learn Python and PyGTK? This blog on learning Python seems like a good place to get inspired.

I received an email saying that epilicious didn’t work very well in epiphany 1.9.x. Since Debian isn’t packaging pre-releases of GNOME 2.14 I decided to try to get Ubuntu Dapper installed in a qemu image. I tried using the age-tested method of installing a stable version first (Breezy), and then upgrading to the unstable, not-yet-released version (Dapper).

It literally took hours to get Breezy installed. A small change of /etc/apt/sources.list later I was ready to move on to Dapper. More than 500 packages were needed to be downloaded for the upgrade. During the upgrade there was a conflict due to a file that had been moved from one package to another. There seemed to be no easy way out of the situation as the proposed solution (apt-get -f install) would remove the kernel itself. I gave up and I’ll be looking elsewhere to find a way to check out the GNOME pre-releases.

I’ve never had any problems at all taking a Debian system from stable to unstable. It has required a few steps sometimes, but I’ve always been able to rely on the packaging tools to take me from point A to point B. This really goes to show that Ubuntu, despite it’s origins, isn’t Debian.

I’m gaining more and more confidence that my decision to move back to Debian was the correct decision.

For the first time in years I don’t have a Ubuntu system installed at home. Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing with ArchLinux and it’s been good so far. I especially enjoy the frequent updates to the software. Ubuntu with its two releases per year has been leaving me less and less satisfied lately. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great at work where I need a system I can rely on. For home, however, I want a totally different system. I want it bleeding edge on top, with a less bloody edge at the bottom. Arch Linux gives me exactly that!

I just tried installing Dapper FT2. I suppose in attempt to see if tracking Ubuntu unstable would be an interesting hobby. The install CD’s expert mode didn’t work at all! I ended up in a cul-de-sac since it apparently doesn’t like non-networked system (yes, I’m still on a dialup!). The non-expert mode worked better, but the system didn’t boot once installed. The kernel didn’t manage to find the proper modules to deal with my SATA drive. A few hours later I had downloaded the kernel sources and had a few failed kernel compiles (some USB-related driver kept resulting in compilation errors). Once the I had a kernel that booted I decided to look at what I had installed. Oh my DOYC, a default Ubuntu system is amazingly bloated. I installed debfoster and started cleaning up. 50% of the packages went out the door… Then I stopped to think about what I was doing. Ubuntu clearly isn’t a system for me anymore. If I need a Debian-based system on my computer I’ll just go for the real thing (Sid of course) instead. My Ubuntu Dapper FT2 CD went in the bin.

All I needed to do was fill the hard disk with zeros. Simple right? It turned out not to be. My Ubuntu liveCD is broken, it hangs when I get to the keyboard chooser. My Phlak live CD didn’t cut it either. My minimal System Rescue CD couldn’t handle the SATA disk… Off to the Knoppix home page and one burnt and booted CD later I have a funtioning Linux system. Thank DYOC (Deity of Your Own Choice) for Knoppix!

I wrote a post on using udev together with Gnome Volume Manager (GVM). My recent upgrade to Ubuntu Breezy revealed that my hack was just that, a hack, and a bad hack at that. It doesn’t work in Breezy!

It turns out there’s a right way of doing this—use HAL! As so often I could have saved some time by simply reading the comments in the configuration files in /etc. (BTW, this is exactly the reason why I love Debian/Ubuntu. The configuration files are their own documentation. Brilliant, simply brilliant.) Anyway, playing around a little with HAL’s fdi files wasn’t a bad thing I guess. In the end I retired my udev setup from my earlier post and put the following lines in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/local.fdi:

<device>
  <match key="volume.uuid" string="60CA-2822">
    <merge key="storage.automount_enabled_hint"
      type="bool">false</merge>
  </match>
</device>

This hint is honoured by GVM and the device isn’t mounted.

RedHat published quite a useful introduction to hal. The hal specification is also a good place to find information.

I’ve been walking around for a while wondering if I should dare upgrade my machine to Breezy. Given that my home machine still isn’t back (and it might never be actually) I didn’t have any place to check if upgrading Hoary to Breezy really worked—if I were to do it, it’d have to be on my work machine. I really didn’t want my work machine to be out of commission, running Linux in a Windowsshop has made me feel like I need to show just how stable Linux is, having to spend a day to re-install Hoary just because an upgrade to Breezy failed wasn’t really an option. Today I took the plunge, and it worked just fine!

I started with downloading all the needed packages:

$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -d

Quite some time later I had a /var partition that was 93% full. I dropped out to a console and changed to single-user mode. I got myself a root shell with

$ sudo su -

And then started the upgrade. I did get two failures and dpkg bailed out but a simple apt-get -f install repaired it all and I could continue the upgrade. All in all I issued the following command:

# apt-get dist-upgrade
# apt-get -f install
# apt-get dist-upgrade
# apt-get -f install
# apt-get dist-upgrade

After the last dist-upgrade there was still one package that wasn’t upgraded, rhythmbox. Installing it explicitly took care of its dependencies:

# apt-get install rhythmbox

After some clean-up in /etc I was ready to reboot. Not a single problem