Daniel Baumann - Random Debian Blog

Debian Live Autobuilds

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 01:49:00 EDT

Right now I am sitting in the train to the airport for going to DebCamp/DebConf 11 in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. During DebCamp amongst other things I am going to work on finishing up the last bits on getting daily/weekly Debian Live autobuilds back for wheezy.

This spring Jimmy Kaplowitz offered to help with the task of overseeing the debian-live autobuilder and to coordinate necessary bits with cdimage.debian.org. Having them on cdimage.d.o became recently possible as Steve McIntyre offered to make a VM available for us (live-build requires root privileges, and naturally, you would not want to let that run on the host system itself, that is why in the past it was not possible to build them on cdimage.d.o).

The remaining issues are, and this is why the autobuilds are not yet back since spring, that live-build still needs two things: a couple of tweeks for wheezy, and the autobuild stuff need to be properly integrated into live-build itself. That will happen as an additional binary package live-build-cron with a bunch of debconf questions, so that everyone and his dog can setup a debian-live autobuild server on his own machine. The initial upload (which will not yet work, do not bother to try) was uploaded to experimental this week and cleared the new queue, now looking forward to get this all finished up and resulting in a live-build uploaded to unstable by the end of the week. In the second week, Jimmy arrives, I will be introducing him to live-build and the various little things to watch for and hopefully manage to persuade him to take over the autobuilds maintenance.

Having all images that are based on packages solely from the stable/testing/unstable archives moved to cdimage.d.o is freeing up ressources on live.debian.net which did the job in the past since etch. Ben Armstrong volunteered to help with overseeing the live.d.n instance of live-build-cron that will build more then once per day images for si, with the only difference that they will not use live-* from the archive but the latest snapshots from our git snapshots repository. This will be a big help for the development as eventually we will be autotesting these images for various things.

Last but not least, thanks to both Jimmy and Ben for all your kindness, patience and help with this during the last couple of months. We have interesting times ahead.

Debian Live 6.0.2 Images

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 08:23:00 EDT

Two days before the 6.0.2 squeeze point release a user reported that usb-hdd images are not bootable for him. We could not reproduce that for several days but thanks to David Endler, we found out a few days ago that the reason for this is the following commit:

Setting partition flags after creating the filesystem, workaround for bug in parted where we result in having the partition type set to linux otherways.

The original problem was that in some situation the code resulted in having a wrong partition type and that can let to confusion for some bioses. For other reasons, the applied workaround has the side effect to cause parted to not set the bootable flat at all anymore and by that creating an even bigger problem - most crappy bioses these days require the bootable flag to be set and refuse to boot from a device otherwise (Missing Operating System). Or in other words, the fix solved the original problem but created another one that is affecting much more bioses.

Rather than doing a hasty and suboptimal build of 6.0.2 with the commit reverted (and wasting resources for a 6.0.2a build some time later), we have looked into fixing the original problem properly without causing side effects. Images for the 6.0.2 squeeze point release will therefore be published in the next couple of days.

Re: Dealing with missing locales on remote hosts

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 06:25:00 EDT

Vincent, the right way to deal with missing locales on remote hosts is to not deal with them at all.

On Debian wheezy and newer systems, eglibc contains the C.UTF-8 locale in the libc-bin package. This together with unsetting AcceptEnv (or when customized, removing LANG and LC_* from it) in sshd_config allows to get rid of locales on servers entirely (if you really require locales, then you would have installed locales-all anyway and the problem would not exist in the first place).

Some time ago, I have backported the C.UTF-8 changes (1, 2, and 3) and applied to my build of eglibc for Debian squeeze.

More information about C.UTF-8 can be found in #609306.

Progress Linux 1.0.0~pre1 (artax)

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:47:00 EDT

The Progress Linux project is pleased to announce the availability of the first prerelease of the upcoming Progress Linux 1.0 (artax).

The images are available for download at:

http://archive.progress-linux.org/progress-images/artax/

A full list of changes may be viewed at:

http://www.progress-linux.org/releases/artax/1.0.0_pre1/

Booting images from within EXTLINUX

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 08:16:00 EDT

Similar as people are doing with a seperate package for grub, Debians extlinux package as of version 2:4.03+dfsg-5 (and if you want a graphical boot menu, you will need syslinux-themes-debian version 4-1 or newer; both uploaded to experimental) handles booting images through memdisk out of the box now.

After you have upgraded your packages, just do:

Copy or symlink your images with the suffix .iso or .img to /boot.
~~Set EXTLINUX_MEMDISK="true" in /etc/default/extlinux.~~
Run extlinux-update.
Profit.

Update: After some more testing, EXTLINUX_MEMDISK defaults to true now.

Adding support for Lzip compression to reprepro

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 17:40:00 EDT

Today, I prepared a patch to reprepro to add support for debian packages using Lzip compression.

A patched reprepro of squeeze for amd64 and i386 can be fetched from here. An example package using Lzip compression, lzip itself, is here (for this example, the package is build as 3.0 native on purpose).

Hopefully the patch will be merged so lzip compressed binary and source packages can be handled with reprepro.

Adding support for Lzip compression to dpkg

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 15:49:00 EDT

Today, I prepared a patch to dpkg to add support using Lzip compression.

A patched dpkg of squeeze for amd64 and i386 can be fetched from here. An example package using Lzip compression, lzip itself, is here (for this example, the package is build as 3.0 native on purpose).

Hopefully the patch will be merged so we can make use of lzip compressed binary and source packages in Debian.

dosfstools 3.0.10

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 03:50:00 EDT

dosfstools did not correctly handle LFN (see Debian bug #596329 for more information) and had some false positives with bad filenames (see Debian bug #596327 for more information). Todays release of version 3.0.10 fixes this.

Source tarballs can be downloaded as usual from its homepage.

The World's most powerful Wireless Network Card

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:25:00 EDT

About two weeks ago I got a Wifly-City G2000, the world's most powerful 802.11bg wireless network card. It features 2000mW which is 10 times more than the legally allowed limit of 200mW in Switzerland (or 2 times more than the allowed 1000mW in the USA, 5 times more than the allowed 400mW in Brazil, or 20 times more than the allowed 100mW in the EU).

The adapter is sold as a set named Wifly-City AVATAR-4PA with some accessories.

click on the images for full resolution

The box prominelty lists Linux compatibility and contains the following part:

1x Wireless Network Adapter with standard USB Type Mini-B
(blue top face, black rear side)
1x 7dbi omnidirectional Antenna (black; SMA)
1x 10db directional Antenna (black; SMA)
1x 1m USB Cable (black; one Type A to Type Mini-B)
1x 5m USB Y Cable¹ (transparent; two Type A in Y to Type Mini-B)
1x Suction Cup (black)
1x 8cm Mini-CD with drivers and a manual

The adapter has a Realtek 8187L chipset. This is particulary nice since there is no firmware needed for this chipset (therefore no questinable binary-only firmware blob). Also, it works out of the box with any Linux as of kernel version 2.6.30 and newer. I tested it on lenny with kernel backports, vanilla squeeze and vanilla sid. In all of these setups, it works out of the box without any configuration whatsoever - just plug it in and it works. I know that this is how it is supposed to be but still, I am always surprised again when things just work.

For those who care, this is the output of dmesg when plugging in the card...

[...]
usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6
usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=8187
usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 1-1: Product: RTL8187_Wireless_LAN_Adapter
usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Manufacturer_Realtek_RTL8187_
usb 1-1: SerialNumber: xxxxxxxxxxxx
usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
phy1: Selected rate control algorithm 'minstrel'
phy1: hwaddr xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx, RTL8187vB (default) V1 + rtl8225z2, rfkill mask 2
rtl8187: Customer ID is 0xFF
Registered led device: rtl8187-phy1::tx
Registered led device: rtl8187-phy1::rx
rtl8187: wireless switch is on
usbcore: registered new interface driver rtl8187
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan1: link is not ready
wlan1: direct probe to AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (try 1)
wlan1: direct probe responded
wlan1: authenticate with AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (try 1)
wlan1: authenticated
wlan1: associate with AP xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (try 1)
wlan1: RX AssocResp from xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (capab=0x411 status=0 aid=5)
wlan1: associated
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlan1: link becomes ready
wlan1: no IPv6 routers present
[...]

...and this is the output of lsusb:

Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0bda:8187 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8187 Wireless Adapter

Special Offer

I have played with the card for some time now and am really pleased with it. It works nicely with all the standard tools (aircrack-ng, kismet, etc.).

The only bummer is that the card is quite expensive. Fortunately, we could arrange a good deal for Free Software people where the store selling it does not make any money on it: instead of 89 USD you can get it for 68 USD (including everything).

If you are interested in getting one and you are comming to DebConf 10 in New York between 2010-07-25 and 2010-08-08, you can write an email to Ralph Amissah or speak to Ralph personally during the event.

¹ I have no idea why they are shipping with a Y cable because the adapter does not need one. However, it does not disturb and in case I ever need an Y cable, I now have one :)

Debian Live Web Images Builder

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 11:46:00 EDT

Richard Nelson, an outstanding debian-live contributor and team member since many years, has setup an instance of the live-helper CGI scripts that are included within live-helper.

This webbuilder lets users get their own customized images without the need of having to install live-helper and build them on their own. It's available at live-helper.debian.net.

Apart from having some better looking html form and adding an online-help that will be worked on soon, it's working great. Thanks you, Richard.

Syslinux Themes for Debian

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:52:00 EDT

10 days ago, I uploaded syslinux-themes-debian. It is sitting in the NEW queue ever since, and aparently I cannot rely on it being accepted anytime soon (it can be installed from the repository mentioned on the maintainers homepage, though).

However, while being still a first working version only that needs some improvements (especially until it could be used as a generic ressource for any other tool to make use of it, like live-helper or debian-cd, eventually), here's a screenshot from the squeeze theme, credits and a big thanks for the awesome graphics to Agnieszka Czajkowska.

EXTLINUX as Alternative Bootloader

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:33:00 EDT

In September, the Debian GRUB maintainers took a step further in the long way of deprecating grub in favour of grub2.

From my personal point of view, grub2 is not the way to go. Mostly because of these reasons:

I don't have systems using a non-ext{3,4} filesystems.
I don't have use for any of the grub2 advanced features.
I don't want to wait another few seconds until grub2 has been loaded.
I don't want to learn yet another theme-ing mechanism for bootloader splashes and menu structures.
I don't want to use a different bootloader project, regardless from which media I boot (iso, usb-hdd, netboot).

Back in Juli, when I was listening to the talk of Giacomo Catenazzi at DebConf 9 about bootloaders in Debian (high (618MB), low (110MB)), I was reminded that I really should getting EXTLINUX splittet out of Debians syslinux packaging and made available as an alternative bootloader within Debian.

Last week I hacked together an initial working version and uploaded it to experimental. Note that the two comands extlinux-install and update-extlinux do not have all the safety belts yet, the theme-ing mechanisms are not integrated yet (I'll upload a syslinux-themes-debian soon), and that the layout of the generation of the config files in /boot/extlinux may could change (debian-wise, not upstream-wise). For me, it works already well though, I'm using it on my main desktop and notebook.

If you want to help finding bugs or submitting wishlist bugs for additional stuff to be added, and recovering from an unbootable system is not a problem for you, you're welcome to try it out:

	# apt-get install -t experimental extlinux syslinux-common
	# sed -i -e 's|^postinst_hook =.*$|postinst_hook = update-extlinux|' \
		-e 's|^postrm_hook =.*$|postrm_hook = update-extlinux|' \
		/etc/kernel-img.conf
	# mkdir -p /boot/extlinux
	# update-extlinux
	# extlinux-install DEVICE

Update: Rather than having /etc/kernel-img.conf modified by users, bootloader packages should add symlinks to their update scripts to /etc/kernel/postinst.d and /etc/kernel/postrm.d. Uploaded new version to experimental. Thanks maks for mentioning it.

Update 2: Also, grub2 now (through grub-common) unavoidably pulls in libfreetype6 as depends. This is, for me, unacceptable depends to have on a server (OTOH, extlinux has no non-essential depends), YMMV.

dosfstools 3.0.5

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 19:06:00 EDT

Unfortunately, the last release of dosfstools had a stupid bug in dosfsck introduced by the VFAT patent avoidance patch that can cause data loss (see Debian bug #538758 for more information). Todays release of version 3.0.5 fixes this.

Source tarballs can be downloaded as usual from its homepage.

dosfstools 3.0.3 and 3.0.4

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 02:30:00 EDT

In May, I have uploaded dosfstools version 3.0.3 that added support for Xilinx's Microblaze processor, which I forgot to blog about.

Today, I have uploaded version 3.0.4 that fixes a problem when running on Linux with the VFAT patent avoidance patch and fixes a bug in dosfsck.

Source tarballs can be downloaded as usual from its homepage.

Re: How to not use lintian overrides

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:34:00 EDT

Dear Julien, apart from the fact that delivering a message in the way you usually do it with such posts totally sucks, it might not hurt if you think about it first, thanks.

For those who care about: Debian Forensics is a packaging team for forensic related packages in Debian. Although I am part of the team where I do work from time to time on the packages the team maintains, I do not want to be listed in uploaders, as I have already enough packages to care about on my own. Adding a lintian override is the only workaround to get rid of the annoying lintian warnings. Or well, I could stop doing uploads and ask other people to do the work instead...

Update: There is this and that thread where it was discussed some time ago, without solution. Thanks pabs for mentioning them.

dosfstools 3.0.2

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 14:37:00 EDT

I have uploaded dosfstools version 3.0.2 that contains another few fixes. Source tarballs can be downloaded as usual from its homepage.

The aim for 3.0 was to unify all the patches out there that have been accumulated over the years. As this is mostly completed now, I will soon start doing real work which will lead to dosfstools 3.1 eventually.

dosfstools 3.0.1

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 17:11:00 EDT

I have uploaded dosfstools version 3.0.1 that contains another few fixes. Source tarballs can be downloaded as usual from its homepage.

dosfstools 3.0.0

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 07:06:00 EDT

dosfstools is a collection of three utilities for making and checking FAT/MS-DOS filesystems:

dosfsck (aka fsck.msdos and fsck.vfat)
dosfslabel
mkdosfs (aka mkfs.dos and mkfs.vfat)

Unfortunately, dosfstools are without an active upstream maintainer for a couple of years. After I took over the package in Debian in June, I'm now also taking over upstream.

Version 3.0.0 includes all accumulated patches from Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and Suse together with some reordering of the sources. Packages have been uploaded to Debian sid, source tarballs can be downloaded from its new home.

Re: Debian not complying to licenses

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:12:00 EDT

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl has replied to my blog post about Debian not complying to licenses.

Dear Alexander, Debian is still not complying to licenses. And please don't cite me without the necessary context, thanks.

First, debian-cd (and also debimg) must contain the sources for syslinux, not to fulfil the GPL, but to fulfil the Debian policy. Read what I wrote here and here.

Second, even if debian-cd would go for source distribution under GPL clause 3b), both the current debian-cd version available in unstable (version 3.0.4) and current svn head (revision 1686, dated 2008-09-04) do not contain a written offer to obtain the sources for the embedded syslinux binary and are therefore, still, violating the GNU General Public License.

Debian not complying to licenses

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:19:00 EDT

First of all, I don't want to blame individual persons. This is just a note of how disappointed I'm about some parts of Debian that are not complying to licenses when it comes to distributing software.

debian-cd embedds copy of syslinux without source

A couple of years ago, I took over the maintenance of the syslinux package since its previous maintainer was MIA. The takeover was motivated by to the fact, that having started to take care about live systems, I also started to use syslinux on a daily basis and that the syslinux package in Debian was horribly outdated.

At that time, I found out that debian-cd, the toolkit to build the official Debian Installer images, doesn't take syslinux out of the archive at build-time of the image, but rather embedds a copy of the required binaries inside the package itself. So I asked Steve to update the binary what he did. Before the etch release, I needed to ask the debian-cd team to sync again their embedded syslinux copy to match the one I had uploaded to the archive, as it was again outdated.

On the other hand, live-helper, the toolkit to build the official Debian Live images, was always using the package out of the archive and did never had that problem.

After we have released the Debian Lenny Live Beta 1 images last week, we got reports from people trying them on Apple MacBooks and failed because syslinux, taken out of the archive (version 3.71), is broken on that hardware. Some people stated that Debian Installer images do work. That is because debian-cd has an embedded copy of syslinux (version 3.63) which doesn't have that regressions.

Since syslinux version 3.71 is present in testing/lenny as well as unstable/sid, and stable/etch has version 3.31, that means... if debian-cd is embedding a syslinux binary with a different version, it must contain the sources for it (it also needs to contain the sources for it anyway, even if it would embedd binaries of the current version, however, it would be a tiny bit less arguable if its sources would be at least present in the Debian archive). So I checked debian-cd, and surprise, it doesn't contain syslinux sources.

Syslinux is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. That means, that if you distribute the binaries and sources together, you can remove both at the same time if you decide to no longer distribute the binary (that is what Debian uses to do). This let me to bug #497270. The option to distribute the binary with a note on how to get the sources, valid for three years, could theoretically be done, but isn't used so far (since it has pretty bad practical implications of keeping sources arround even after having stopped to distribute the binaries).

Debian sarge release has incomplete source images

Checking fo the consequences for embedding bootloader binaries in debian-cd, I just saw that the Debian sarge release does ship syslinux version 2.04 in its images, but is shipping syslinux 2.11 in its source images. This is another violation of the GPL and I've filled this as bug #497471.

...and syslinux is just one bootloader, only used for i386 and amd64. Someone still needs to check for all the other bootloaders for the other architectures we support (and those also for the etch release).

cdimage.debian.org distributes images without sources

While browsing arround on cdimage.debian.org, I also found the kde4beta livecds made by the Debian KDE team back in November 2007. Although these images are nice, there is no source available for them at all. They use packages that are not available anymore in Debian since a long time. This time, this doesn't only violate the GPL as in the previous two cases, but almost any copyleft license under which we distribute software in main and that is included on these images. I've filled this as bug #497462.

Again, this is not about blaming individual persons. But I'm pretty disappointed by these things. In Debian, we spend a big chunk of time checking licenses of packages before we start distributing them. We have our beloved NEW queue where, after the Debian Developer who has initial uploaded a package and has checked the sources, also ftp-masters are re-checking each and every package to ensure that our archive is kept legal. The NEW queue is a mesurement that consumes a big deal of our time, making uploading packages new packages slow, but this is the prize we pay for ensuring our freedom. And we do also make a big fuss about cluebating upstreams that don't respect licenses (be it intentionally or by accident). However, it appears that as good as our package checks are, we spend little to no time to check our resulting products made from these packages.

Update: kde4beta livecds have been removed now from cdimage.debian.org, see #497462.

Update 2: debimg does the same crap.

Update 3: After beeing forced to write again about debimg violating GPL, the offending binaries got finally removed now.

Update 4: debian-cd seems to be fixed in SVN by this commit.

Debian Live Lenny Beta1

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 06:17:00 EDT

This is a post of the original announcement sent to debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org.

The Debian Live team is pleased to announce the first beta of Debian Lenny's Live images.

Although we missed releasing images for Etch along with the installer images, we are now prepared to release live images within the regular Lenny release process. This is the first official release of Debian Live and the whole team has been working hard during the past 2.5 years to make Debian's own live systems become a reality.

Nevertheless, we do need your help to find more bugs and improve the live systems, so please try them out. The images are available at:

	http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/lenny_live_beta1/

Please also have a look at the known issues listed below.

Main features

100% Debian

The build process of Debian Live basically consists of creating a Debian chroot, installing one or more kernels along with live-initramfs (a set of hooks into initramfs-tools for handling booting from read-only media) and generating a bootable image from that.

This process is handled by live-helper, a collection of shell scripts that allow us to automate and customize this process. Considerable care is taken to ensure that the resulting live system is not tainted by the host system and that installed packages are not modified morethan absolutely necessary.

This ensures that Debian Live really is Debian, and not "just another" a Debian-based live system.

Flavours

Although live-helper is a toolkit to produce your very own live systems with only a few steps, we also provide prebuilt images that are meant to be used as reference systems for end-users. Currently, this consists of the three major desktop environments (GNOME, KDE and Xfce), as well as a small 'standard' image without a graphical environment.

For the desktop environments, package selection is performed by 'tasksel' with the respective desktop task, whilst the 'standard' image contains only packages of "Priority: standard" or greater, notwithstanding a handful of live-specific packages (console-common, eject, file, kbd, live-initramfs, locales, sudo and vim-tiny).

Image types

Debian Live offers prebuilt images for CD/DVD discs, USB sticks (or any HD-media-like device), tarballs (for PXE netboot) as well as a bare squashfs image to boot from the web directly.

Live Magic

Live Magic is an GUI frontend around the live-helper scripts, offering a subset of the features of live-helper in an easy-to-use graphical user interface.

live-magic 1.0 was recently uploaded to sid and is the recommended version. It currently supports 7 languages.

Live Installer

Live Installer is a special udeb for the Debian Installer that (optionally) replaces a part of d-i in order to install the system from the live image instead of to bootstrapping it from .deb packages. This way, a live system can be easily installed to the harddisk, ensuring that the look and feel of the installation (including preseeding) works the same as the regular installer process.

Unfortunately, live-installer does still have a few minor bugs left and is thus not included in our builds yet; we hope to be able to include it in the next beta.

Known issues in this release

The prebuilt images for gnome-desktop and kde-desktop are a bit too big to fit on a CD. Although the automatic installation of Recommends was disabled to build the images, they are still too big. This will need further tweaking as they are supposed to fit with the next beta.
The rescue flavour, containing system rescue and forensic related packages, is missing in this beta release.
There will be a DVD image with the next beta that includes all three desktop environments so that you can choose at boot time which system you would like to start.
Due to time constraints, the prebuilt images for Beta1 are only covering i386 and amd64; with the next beta, powerpc and sparc will follow (if you wish to test these architectures earlier, please build them yourself).
The new desktop artwork is not yet included.
The syslinux menu is still the old, prompt-based one. A freshly made new syslinux vgamenu using the official lenny desktop artwork is on the way (the same as d-i media will use in Lenny).
No live-installer included yet (if you wish to test live-installer earlier, please build it yourself).
No win32-loader included yet.
Sid packages used - At the time of building the live images, both live-helper 1.0.0-1 and live-initramfs 1.139.1-1 from sid were used. Since the latter has not yet migrated to testing, it was included manually as a local package. This is undesirable, as the release is supposed to be self-contained - however, it is just a convenient workaround as both were granted freeze exception and will migrate soon.

Plans for next Beta release

We are looking forward to upload Beta2 in about two weeks from now (maybefollowed by a third beta) with one final RC after that which should be identical to the final release.

Some more details about the open things we would like to address in Beta2 and later can be found at the wiki page.

The Debian Live team is still looking for more contributors for new features (post-lenny, though) as well as documentation writers for the manual (always). If you care about live systems, please join and help!

Thanks

Last but not least, our thanks goes to everyone who has contributed and to all maintainers that have kindly fixed live-specific bugs in their packages.

Hewlett-Packard takes the piss out of their customers

Fri, 23 May 2008 06:29:00 EDT

I got a new Hewlett-Packard LaserJet P3005X. I unpacked the device, connected power and ethernet, went to HP support page and downloaded the firmware upgrade for it.

After carefully reading through the whole readme, I initiated the firmware upload. After successfull flashing cycle, the printer reboots and freezes with this message on the display:

	Downld file now
	SEND RFU UPGRADE

...and the printer is dead, just after ten minutes of unpacking it.

How comes? HP equips some LaserJet P3005X with a formatter (that is the embedded "computer" inside the printer) that is not upgradeable. Brilliant.

And that is why Hewlett-Packard sucks beyond belief:

It is not possible to know for the customer that some formatters are not upgradable - there is at no point any documentation of this issue, neither on HPs homepage, nor in the shipped documentation (ironically, HP ships two yellow sheets with errata for the printed manual to correct typos in serial numbers of supplies - warnings to kill your printer with a legitimate firmware upgrade is oviously not considered worth the paper).
Once you learned the reason for this mess from searching the Internet, there is no way to avoid it with another P3005 - there is no way to distinguish an upgradable and not upgradable formatter. All P3005 customers thus shall stick with old firmware (and e.g. not getting the fixed power saving mechanism by newer firmware).
Dead printers have to be send to a HP Repair Center at your own costs (and the HP support hotline you need to call in order to initiate the resend is expensive as well).
Although this happens with a brand new device covered by warranty, HP even charge you to exchange the formatter for fixing their own shortcomming.
The whole issue is know at least since December 2007 (see HP Forum).

Thanks Hewlett-Packard, you definitely did not make my day today.

My misc developement news (Januar 2008)

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 04:46:00 EDT

In the past I was not blogging small things if they were not worth a full blog entry on their own (or if I did not have the time to make up a full entry of it :). Inspired by the example of Raphaël Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> with "News for Debian developers" for <debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org>, I am intending to do the same on a monthly basis about my own Debian related work. I will only list some noteworthy changes and news, though. This first entry about January 2008 also covers a few things from the last month of 2007.

General News

Trusted Computing

After having taken over some rotting ITP bugs, Debian has now all the important packages to support Trusted Computing on platforms containing a TPM chip. The packages are not in good enough quality for release, but there is still some time left to fix that. Looking forward to make lenny supporting TPM properly out of the box, as well as aiming for making Debian the best TPM enabled distribution available.

Currently, the TSS software stack consists of trousers, tpm-tools, opencryptoki, libengine-tpm-openssl, and ecryptfs-utils.
Smartcards

I am using smartcards since a while to hold GnuPG, LUKS, and OpenSSL keys/certificates. Thanks to Jonas Meurer <mejo@debian.org> for applying a fix and a patch of mine to cryptsetup. Together with my uploads of gnupg-pkcs11-scd, pam-pkcs11 and pcsc-omnikey, I can now use Debian out of the box with smartcards for authentification, not relaying on patched or private packages anymore.

The next aim is to integrate smartcard support into debian-installer. It should be possible to use/store keys or certificates for encrypted filesystems directly from/to a smartcard during installation time.

Package News

botan-devel

The Botan library is maintained upstream in a stable release branch and a development release branch. Before, I was uploading as versioned source packages, botan1.4 and botan1.5. To be a bit more consistent, the two source packages are named botan and botan-devel now.
gitosis

Tommi Virtanen <tv@eagain.net> has written a marvelous tool to securely manage hosted git repositories, named gitosis. Having always looked for an elegant sollution to maintain git repositories through push/pull over SSH only, this package made an excellent addition to the Debian archive.
gnunet

GNUnet, more precisely the gnunet, gnunet-gtk and gnunet-qt packages where mainly maintained the last years by Arnaud Kyheng <Arnaud.Kyheng@free.fr> with me playing co-maintainer.

Arnaud has become busy within the last months, so I took over a more active role on its maintenance. Currently, all gnunet related packages are in sync and in its latest upstream version available in the archive. There is even a new sibling, gnunet-fuse.
icedove-l10n

After one and a half year of pushing its maintainer without any effect at all, I finally took over the unmaintained icedove-locales package in October 2007. I immediately changed the package to the proper naming scheme (icedove-l10n-*) which was an outstanding issue since August 2006.

In the last weeks, I have added unofficial localizations for Galizian, Nepali and Ukrainian, now supporting 38 localizations in total. Icedove localizations are now in good shape again, always matching the Icedove version and no longer lagging behind.
iceowl-l10n

Following iceweasel-l10n and icedove-l10n, there are finally also localizations for iceowl (Mozilla Sunbird) available. Populating packages for iceowl-extension (Mozilla Lightning) from the same source package is a bit trickier package-wise, but will be available soon too.
iceweasel-l10n

In September 2007, Robert Milan <rmh@debian.org> on behalf of the Catalan/Valencian Debian translator team asked me to remove the iceweasel-l10n-roa-es-val package. Unfortunately, this localization is related to a long standing cultural and political dispute between the Catalan speaking Spanish people and the City of Valencia. Additionally, the localization itself is of poor quality. Of course, I removed the package in unstable immediately and prepared an upload for stable at the same time.

As usual, me asking something on debian-release results in first beeing ignored, then denied and third, two month after my request, beeing privately asked to upload nevertheless. This is one of the reasons I sometimes fully understand fellow maintainers not carring about stable at all anymore, it has become indeed too much of a hassle.
traceroute

For the last decade, Debian was shipping an implementation of traceroute originating from BSD. After I took over the package in late 2006, it became clear to me that Debian should not maintain its very own version of traceroute. Therefore, I replaced traceroute in August 2007 with an implementation from Dmitry K. Butskoy <Dmitry@Butskoy.name>. Apart from the fact, that this modern implementation is better in every way (faster, cleaner, less bugs), it has an active upstream maintainer and is used by different other Linux distributions too.
syslinux

Thanks to the work of Robert Milan <rmh@debian.org>, syslinux has now 64-bit CPU detection in unstable (2:3.55-2) and experimental (2:3.60-2) again.

Team News

Debian Forensics

Unfortunately, Debian has at the moment very few forensic related packages in the archive.

Christophe Monniez <dfence.242@gmail.com> maintains a lot of forensic related packages on behalf of his Debian based forensic LiveCD. Beeing interested to see them in Debian, I am mentoring him now how to merge them properly into Debian where possible, and maintain them in the official archive. We have formed an Alioth project for this purpose. Packages are maintained in git, everyone is welcome to join.
Debian Website

After having offered my help to maintain the Debian Consultants list, I got added to the webwml team. Doing Debian consultancy myself, this is just another way of helping out Debian from time to time by adding, removing and updating some entries of like-minded people in a list.

Debian Live Web Boot

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 04:58:00 EDT

Thanks to a patch from Mathieu Geli, live-initramfs as of version 1.99.1-1 supports a boot parameter called fetch.

That means, that it is enough to have a bootloader (syslinux, grub, whatever) and a kernel with the initrd image on a medium (cdrom, usb-stick, whatever) to boot a Debian Live system directly from the Internet or the local network without needing to setup a netboot environment (as in PXE). Just type:

	live fetch=http://example.com/my_image.squashfs

at the boot prompt. Whithin the boot process of the live system, the squashfs image will be once downloaded into RAM. After that point, no network access is required anymore. This is also the reason why it was invented initially, it is an alternative to the conventional netboot (PXE with tftp for boot and shared root over a network filesystem such as cifs, nfs or smb) where permanent network access is required, not a replacement.

Temporary limitations

At the moment, the amount of RAM required to run a web booted live session is equal to the size of the squashfs image. Because squashfs compression is quite good, this is not so much of a problem on reasonably modern machines (512MB for a complete Xfce Debian desktop, 758MB for a complete GNOME or KDE Debian desktop system). Nevertheless, improvements to use a local swap partition to store the image are on the way (including caching and updating).
Due to a still pending move of the machine where live.debian.net is hosted, there are not yet autobuild squashfs images available. Later, you can just boot with something similar as: live fetch=http://live.debian.net/webboot/etch.

Swiss Voting on OOXML

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 07:54:00 EDT

This is the result of Swiss voting on ISO/IEC DIS 29500, the fast-tracking of the Microsoft Office Open XML file format.

4 screen AG	approval
Accenture AG	approval
ADVIS AG	approval
ALTRAN AG	approval
Baggenstos Wallisellen	approval
Bechtle IT-Systemhaus Thalwil	approval
CIS-Consulting	approval
Comsoft Direct AG	approval
Coris SA	approval
Dr. Pascal Sieber & Partners AG	approval
dynawell ag	approval
Ecma International	approval
ELCA Informatik AG	approval
EPFL Lausanne	disapproval
FSFE Free Software Foundation Europe	disapproval
GARAIO AG	approval
Gysel Ulrich Emanuel	disapproval
H.R. Thomann Consulting	approval
Hewlett-Packard (Schweiz) GmbH	approval
HSW Luzern, Institut IWI	approval
IAMCP Switzerland	approval
IBM (Schweiz)	disapproval
Informatikstrategieorgan Bund ISB	approval
isolutions gmbh	approval
itsystems AG	approval
Kull AG	approval
leanux.ch AG	approval
Leuchter Informatik AG	approval
MESO Products	approval
Microsoft Schweiz GmbH	approval
MondayCoffee AG	approval
Namics AG	approval
NEXPLORE AG	approval
Novell (Schweiz) AG	approval
Online Consulting AG	approval
Open Text	approval
PageUp Bern	approval
PC-WARE Systems (Schweiz) AG	approval
Puzzle ITC GmbH	disapproval
SBS Solutions AG	approval
Secunet SwissIT AG	disapproval
SIUG Swiss Internet User Group	disapproval
SKSF	approval
Skybow AG	approval
SoftwareONE	approval
SyGroup GmbH	disapproval
Sylog Consulting SA	approval
Syndrega	disapproval
TheAlternative	disapproval
Trivadis AG	approval
Unic Internet Solutions	approval
usedSoft AG	approval
Verein /ch/open	disapproval
WAGNER AG Kirchberg	approval
Wilhelm Tux (Verein)	disapproval
Würgler Consulting	disapproval
Zürcher Hochschule der Künste	disapproval
Total of voting (75% majority)	43 approval (75.4%); 14 disapproal (24.6%)

A majority with 75% has been reached with one vote.

Daniel Baumann - Random Debian Blog

Debian Live Autobuilds

Debian Live 6.0.2 Images

Re: Dealing with missing locales on remote hosts

Progress Linux 1.0.0~pre1 (artax)

Booting images from within EXTLINUX

Adding support for Lzip compression to reprepro

Adding support for Lzip compression to dpkg

dosfstools 3.0.10

The World's most powerful Wireless Network Card

Contents

Special Offer

Debian Live Web Images Builder

Syslinux Themes for Debian

EXTLINUX as Alternative Bootloader

dosfstools 3.0.5

dosfstools 3.0.3 and 3.0.4

Re: How to not use lintian overrides

dosfstools 3.0.2

dosfstools 3.0.1

dosfstools 3.0.0

Re: Debian not complying to licenses

Debian not complying to licenses

debian-cd embedds copy of syslinux without source

Debian sarge release has incomplete source images

cdimage.debian.org distributes images without sources

Debian Live Lenny Beta1

Main features

100% Debian

Flavours

Image types

Live Magic

Live Installer

Known issues in this release

Plans for next Beta release

Thanks

Hewlett-Packard takes the piss out of their customers

My misc developement news (Januar 2008)

General News

Package News

Team News

Debian Live Web Boot

Swiss Voting on OOXML

Why do Hewlett-Packard and Novell vote IN FAVOUR for OOXML!?