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2013 › November
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Richi’s post about the pdiff-by-default agony resonates with me a lot. On EVERY Debian installation I have ever done in the last few years, without any exceptions, I have turned off pdiffs. Even on all the oddball cases (Raspberry Pi, account on a remote machine, …) where I don’t run my install-configs script, I have ended up turning off pdiffs eventually, because it is just so insanely slow on modern internet connections. And by modern I mean even the DSL link my parents’ place has since 14 years. Read more →
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Thanks to Axel Beckert (abe@), 12 people interested in Debian met last Tuesday in Zürich and celebrated the start of our monthly Debian meetup. New faces are always very welcome. If you live in Zürich, or if you’re visiting, please feel free to attend our meetup — no registration necessary. Read more →
2013 › October
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Ideally, an internet connection would be perfectly stable, but since that is not always the case, a watchdog is the next best thing. In case you ever use your home machine(s) remotely, the use case should be clear: make sure the internet connection at home still works so that you can log in when travelling. Read more →
2013 › September
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A couple of times now, I’ve had problems with my server. The earliest one was when a hard disk drive died. Then memory went bad and had to be replaced. Another example was when a power supply of another machine died and took out the whole rack. What all of these incidents have in common: after finding my machine unreachable, I would have loved to be able to look at a logfile that would give me a clue about what just happened. Most of the times, the relevant kernel oopses/panics were not persisted to the syslog. Read more →
2013 › August
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During DebConf, Asheesh presented the idea of using git instead of the file system for storing the contents of Debian Code Search. The hope was that it would lead to fewer disk seeks and less data due to gits delta-encoding. Maybe the reduction would be big enough that enough data could be held in RAM to allow for fast retrieval. Read more →
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I gave two talks at this year’s DebConf, both about systemd. A huge thanks goes to the video team for their excellent work and putting up the videos that quickly! Find the recordings and slides here: Making your package work with systemd (508 MiB ogv) (Slides (≈ 230 KiB PDF)) systemd myths debunked! (456 MiB ogv) (Slides (≈ 230 KiB PDF)) Read more →
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I will arrive at DebConf 2013 on Sunday afternoon. In case you are interested in Go (the programming language), systemd, i3 or getting your package reviewed, please talk to me! :-) Looking forward to meeting many of you in real life. Read more →
2013 › July
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Good news, everyone! dh-golang is now in Debian unstable. With this debhelper addon, packaging software written in Go is very simple. Have a look at the example/ directory in dh-golang to see how it is meant to be used. Essentially, export the DH_GOPKG variable containing the canonical upstream location of the package (e.g. github.com/stapelberg/godebiancontrol) and then use dh $@ --buildsystem=golang --with=golang. That’s it! Read more →
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For some rather advanced isolation and automation work I am currently doing with Debian Code Search I needed to modify the ExecStart= line of a systemd service file programmatically. The recommended interface for programmatically querying service file properties is systemctl show -p ExecStart foo.service, but with the ExecStart= property in particular, the output cannot be parsed well: Read more →
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Posting this on behalf of a friend of mine in the hope that you can help: I’ve failed several times now to find a suitable WLAN USB dongle that works out of the box on Debian testing. Often manufacturers change the chipsets without changing the version numbers, the product pages are incomplete or even state wrong information. Read more →
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As of today, systemd 204 is available in Debian experimental. If you are interested in systemd, please install it and report any issues to the BTS — merely reporting them on IRC is not sufficient, we need to have them in the BTS so we don’t forget about them. Read more →
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Sometimes, people show up in our IRC channel #debian-systemd or on our mailing list pkg-systemd-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org and ask how they can help. This blog post answers that question. First of all, whatever you end up doing, please coordinate with us first! Saying hi in our IRC channel or on our mailing list and explaining what you intend to do is all we ask for. In the past, people have filed bug reports with service files that are not idiomatic, and we really need to avoid that. Read more →
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The German computer magazine c't has covered Debsources in its most recent edition (c't 16/2013). In that article, they also state: Debsources integriert auch eine Code-Suche, allerdings werden lediglich die Quellen des Unstable-Zweigs durchsucht, der zirka ein Drittel des Quellcodes von Debsources ausmacht. This loosely translates to: Read more →
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This blog post is the third of a series of posts dealing with the results of the Debian systemd survey. I intend to give a presentation at DebConf 2013, too, so you could either read my posts, or watch the talk, or both :-). Read more →
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This blog post is the second of a series of posts dealing with the results of the Debian systemd survey. I intend to give a presentation at DebConf 2013, too, so you could either read my posts, or watch the talk, or both :-). Read more →
2013 › June
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I recently moved to Zürich and therefore needed a new internet connection. I am given to understand that fiber will be available at my place in a few months, so I chose to go with a provider that will allow me to eventually switch to fiber once it’s available. Read more →
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At this year’s GPN13 I gave a talk about Debian Code Search. It was in German, so I spent a few hours creating english subtitles. You can watch the video at youtube.com/watch?v=n6DtW3zCTvk with english subtitles. In case you prefer to download the file(s), get http://ftp.ccc.de/events/gpn/gpn13/gpn13-debian-code-search.mp4 (84 MiB) and the corresponding subtitle file at http://t.zekjur.net/gpn13-debian-code-search.srt. Drop both files in the same directory, run mplayer gpn13-debian-code-search.mp4 and press v to enable subtitles. I intend to eventually put the (subtitled) video on YouTube and refer to it from codesearch.debian.net, but I wanted to post the video in its current form already. Read more →
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This blog post is the first of a series of posts dealing with the results of the Debian systemd survey. I intend to give a presentation at DebConf 2013, too, so you could either read my posts, or watch the talk, or both :-). Read more →
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Yesterday I uploaded a big package and got multiple timeouts. I then figured out that DDs can also upload using SFTP (i.e. SSH’s file transfer thingie) instead of traditional FTP, which seems like a more modern alternative. So let’s give that a try. With dput-ng, the following configuration leads to using sftp by default: Read more →
2013 › May
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A week ago, we started the Debian systemd survey. The goal was to figure out a few trends and answer the following two questions: Do our subjective impressions from the discussions on debian-devel reflect the general sentiment about systemd? What are the main concerns that most people have? Thank you all for your participation! Read more →
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Whenever I want to work on some package, I usually clone its git repository, make my changes, then push and upload the Debian package. I don’t keep those repositories around in order to avoid cruft and also to have a 100% clean, up-to-date setup whenever I start working on something. Read more →
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In the past, we have had multiple heated discussions involving systemd. We (the pkg-systemd-maintainers team) would like to better understand why some people dislike systemd. Therefore, we have created a survey, which you can find at http://survey.zekjur.net/index.php/391182 Please only submit your feedback to the survey and not this thread, we are not particularly interested in yet another systemd discussion at this point. Read more →
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My Galaxy Nexus was getting really slow over the last few weeks, meaning simple things like going to the homescreen took multiple seconds. Turns out that the problem is the SD card filesystem / controller getting really slow once the SD card gets nearly filled up. You can verify this by running Androbench, a storage benchmark app. You should get a sequential write performance of a few MB/s (e.g. 8 MB/s), but when affected by the problem, you get about 0.x MB/s. Read more →
2013 › March
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Recently, I was wondering how many Debian Developers are actively working on RC bugs in some way or another in the time period of the last release (squeeze) to now (shortly? before wheezy). I therefore grabbed the mailing list archives of debian-bugs-dist@ from gmane, used only those messages whose X-Debian-PR-Message header matches an RC bug (list retrieved from UDD) and then attributed the message counts to the appropriate Debian Developer. Read more →
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Update: The kinT kinesis keyboard controller from 2020 is an updated version, with several improvements over the older 2013 design! The Kinesis Advantage Contoured is an ergonomic keyboard which I have been using for four years. It has many features that make it a great keyboard, and it’s certainly the best I have ever used. Read more →
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OpenWrt is a nice FOSS Linux firmware (primarily) for wireless routers, which I use for many years. Even though I never experienced a problem with my routers, I’d like to be prepared for hardware failures, software failures and getting my router compromised. Here is a short description of each scenario so that it is clear what I mean: Read more →
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About 4 years ago, I started tracking my configuration files with git. The advantages of storing configuration files in some repository are numerous: You can destroy your configuration/computer and easily revert to a known good state. You can easily distribute and update the same set of configfiles across multiple machines (especially virtual machines or other test setups). You can refer other people to your configfiles if you store them in a public repository. This article describes the way I use git to track my configfiles. My solution is simple and should be easy to understand even if you have not used git extensively before. Read more →
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I just released github.com/mstap/android-davsync, a FOSS tool with which you can (automatically or manually) upload photos to your WebDAV server. Read more →
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Previously, my workflow regarding replying to bugreports outside my own packages was very uncomfortable: I first downloaded the mbox archive from the BTS, then imported that in claws-mail, hit reply all, remove submit@, add bugnumber@, then send the email. Therefore, I decided to hack up a little elisp function to automate this process for notmuch. It first downloads the message from the BTS, adds it to the notmuch database, then calls notmuch-mua-reply on the message and fixes the To: header: Read more →
2013 › February
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I recently worked on the following RC bugs: #696532 — isdnlog: /etc/isdn/isdnlog.isdnctrl0 is easily destroyed in squeeze to wheezy upgrade Pinged the maintainer about uploading a fix to unstable, too (was only fixed in experimental). #693208 — clang: unable to link trivial test program on armhf Filed a request to upload a new version to testing-proposed-updates. #694986 — flash-kernel: postinst modifies /etc/default/rcS Pinged. #694352 — lcdf-typetool include non free adobe data; glyph list Filed a request to upload a new version to testing-proposed-updates. #593607 — pcmanfm wrongly deleted some files in a failed move operation Updated the bugreport status to reflect reality. #698137 — destroys icinga.cfg on postinst when it's a symlink Reproduced, asked whether to NMU. #694622 — nut-snmp: Can't connect to UPS [apcpdu] (snmp-ups-apcpdu): No such file or directory Reproduced, asked for more info. Read more →
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