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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Explanation: Make sure backports is not installed be default
Package: *
Pin: origin ubuntu-backports.mirrormax.net
Pin-Priority: 499

This means that I can keep the backports’ entries in sources.list enabled without being bothered with updating the entire system when doing an apt-get upgrade.

There’s only a minor detail—update-notifier thinks that there are updates available, but once I click it no upgrades are found. I guess there are two pieces of code that checks for upgrades, one doesn’t handle pinning and one does.

[Edited] It seems my whinging about update-notifier's inability to handle pinning was a little premature. It seemed it just needed some time to adapt. Now it’s correctly respecting my whishes not to upgrade any packages available in backports.

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The process is:

1. Download the binary installer from (Sun)[http://java.sun.com/].
2. Make sure fakeroot, java-package and java-common is installed.

3. Execute

   fakeroot make-jpkg –full-name “My Name” –email “My@e.mail”

It will work for both the JDK and the JRE.

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The first one is already passed out—to my brother.

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I didn’t bother with the Synaptics driver for X.org, mostly since I wasn’t sure the suggested kernel patches are in the Ubuntu kernel. Also, I can live with 2.6.10 until Breezy Badger… with the focus on laptops I’ve seen on the Ubuntu dev-list I can’t imagine they’d let such an obvious thing as a non-functioning touchpad slip through.

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Using e2label I set the label on my ext2 partition. This causes pmount to mount the partition using that name.

Then of course I didn’t want the device itself (/dev/sda in most cases) to be mounted. As an experiment I modified my udev rule to only apply to the device:

BUS="usb", SYSFS{serial}="070B000514B09F0", KERNEL="sd?", NAME="%k", \
  SYMLINK="usbstick_priv"

As expected having udev add the link somehow prevents pmount from mounting the device.

Now all that is left is to set the label of the VFAT partition on my USB stick.

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I’ve been using VNC for a while at work now, and mostly I’ve been happy with it. Being on a fast internal network with the server literally at my feet hasn’t made me swear at the lack of speed. The only thing that has irritated me a little is that my VNC sessions aren’t properly secured. I don’t have anything to hide really, but working with security it just didn’t feel right. Sure, I could, and I did for a while, secure it using SSH, but since the client is a Windows machine it makes it all a bit clunky. Requiring a PuTTY instance with port forwarding to be running is plain ugly. An encrypted connection really should be built into VNC by now. So, I decided to take FreeNX for a ride.

Unfortunately FreeNX isn’t in Ubuntu Hoary, however there is a page in the Ubuntu Forum, which is a bit outdated–it covers Warty mostly. Some of the comments in the forum did point me to the Backports project. I don’t really like the Backports (I managed to screw my system up a bit a while ago) but they do seem to have grown up a bit by now. Anyway, I only added the repos to my sources.list long enough to install the packages I needed.

Installation was a breeze. I chose to use custom keys, sorting out the client-side problems created by that turned out to be simple as well. No extra tinkering with the config files seemed necessary.

For the Windows client I am using NoMachine‘s Windows client. In order to use it with my server I needed to copy the public key (on the server: /var/lib/nxserver/home/.ssh/client.id_dsa.key) to the share dir on the client side (you’ll find it’s a subdir to the install dir of the client software). That’s it, password-less remoting of my Linux desktop with the security of SSH. Brilliant.

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