nion's blog - debian

New Maintainer

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:26:57 +0100

Today I got accepted as Debian Developer. I would like to thank the following people (in random order) for their involvment in my NM, mentoring and sponsoring uploads.

Philipp Kern, Michael Schiansky, Daniel Baumann, Héctor García, Norbert Tretkowski, Werner Heuser, Marc Brockschmidt, Lars Wirzenius, Christoph Berg, Jörg Jaspert, James Troup, Martin Krafft (feel yourself added if I forgot you, hopefully not)

Oh and congratulations Holger.

CLT 2007 is over

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 20:42:50 +0100

The Chemnitzer Linuxtage event is over and like every year the event was very nice.
From my point of view it's one of the best organized and community driven events in Germany.

Sadly I just saw one talk (libfind) because most time I was busy with meeting all the people I can just see one time a year on this event and finding a way to allow dpkg to merge old and new configuration files.

This year I attended two booths, the one of my favorite live cd grml and the one of debian.
It was the first time for grml having a booth at the CLT and I think the feedback was quite good.

The debian booth was also very cool and well organized (thanks Noel) and I had alot of interesting discussions with different users.
One question which came up was why debian permits root logins in a default ssh installation. I had no answer for this question since I also think it's definitly a security issue. Elmar Hoffmann thought it could have to do with an easy way of scping files for root without using a user temporary.
If someone has an answer, let me know.

Debian Bug Squashing in Berlin

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 15:34:31 +0200

For those who not read debian-devel-announce mailing list:
as part of the ongoing BSP Marathon, there will be a BSP in
Berlin, Germany on the weekend September 22nd-24th. The BSP will
be hosted in the office of Individual Networks Berlin e.V.

For further details please have a look at the wiki page. Please add
yourself to the wiki page if you plan to attend on:
http://wiki.debian.org/BSP/de/Berlin

Help to translate german debian package descriptions

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 15:26:27 +0200

Jens Seidel announced a site to translate debian package descriptions into the German language.
This is pretty easy, you just need to know english, you don't have to subscribe somewhere, you just need your browser and point it to:

http://kleptog.org/cgi-bin/ddtss2-cgi/de/

There are ~ 10000 descriptions missing. Everyone who ever wanted to help debian, this is your chance to easily do some really important stuff.
So if you have some spare time and don't know what to do, take 10 minutes and translate a description

reportbug in unstable is broken

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 01:18:43 +0200

For those who don't read planet.debian.org (and because there is no bug in the BTS, the reportbug package in debian unstable is currently broken.
If you want to report a bug until its fixed use the patch:

--- reportbug_ui_text.py.broken 2006-08-11 14:43:01.000000000 +0200
+++ reportbug_ui_text.py 2006-08-11 14:43:28.000000000 +0200
@@ -223,6 +223,7 @@
break
list.append(entry)
ewrite('\n')
+ return list
def get_password(prompt=None):
return getpass.getpass(prompt)

[via pkern's blog]
EDIT: bugnumber is #382486

dget

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 22:51:08 +0200

Thijs Kinkhorst gave me on debian-mentors list a cool hint. Christoph Berg wrote a nice small script called dget which is part of the devscripts package in debian. With dget its pretty easy to download source packages from a webserver and dget generetes from the .dsc file the file names of the other files, downloads them and extracts them using dpkg-source.

dget -x http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/note/note_1.3.1-3.dsc
/usr/bin/dget: retrieving http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/note/note_1.3.1-3.dsc
--00:57:24-- http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/note/note_1.3.1-3.dsc
=> `note_1.3.1-3.dsc'
Auflösen des Hostnamen »nion.modprobe.de«.... 81.169.172.197
Verbindungsaufbau zu nion.modprobe.de|81.169.172.197|:80... verbunden.
HTTP Anforderung gesendet, warte auf Antwort... 200 OK
Länge: 576 [text/plain]

100%[================================================>] 576 --.--K/s

00:57:25 (30.52 MB/s) - »note_1.3.1-3.dsc« gespeichert [576/576]

/usr/bin/dget: retrieving http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/note/note_1.3.1.orig.tar.gz
--00:57:25-- http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/note/note_1.3.1.orig.tar.gz
=> `note_1.3.1.orig.tar.gz'
Auflösen des Hostnamen »nion.modprobe.de«.... 81.169.172.197
Verbindungsaufbau zu nion.modprobe.de|81.169.172.197|:80... verbunden.
HTTP Anforderung gesendet, warte auf Antwort... 200 OK
Länge: 42.275 (41K) [application/x-tar]

100%[================================================>] 42.275 166.71K/s

00:57:25 (166.05 KB/s) - »note_1.3.1.orig.tar.gz« gespeichert [42275/42275]

/usr/bin/dget: retrieving http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/note/note_1.3.1-3.diff.gz
--00:57:25-- http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/note/note_1.3.1-3.diff.gz
=> `note_1.3.1-3.diff.gz'
Auflösen des Hostnamen »nion.modprobe.de«.... 81.169.172.197
Verbindungsaufbau zu nion.modprobe.de|81.169.172.197|:80... verbunden.
HTTP Anforderung gesendet, warte auf Antwort... 200 OK
Länge: 3.323 (3.2K) [text/plain]

100%[================================================>] 3.323 --.--K/s

00:57:25 (60.93 KB/s) - »note_1.3.1-3.diff.gz« gespeichert [3323/3323]

dpkg-source: extracting note in note-1.3.1
dpkg-source: unpacking note_1.3.1.orig.tar.gz
dpkg-source: applying ./note_1.3.1-3.diff.gz

Funny code everwhere

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 18:34:02 +0200

Today I saw this in debians fetchmail init script:
su -c "$DAEMON $OPTIONS --nosyslog --nodetach -v -v" $USER <&- 2>&1 && true

Nice!

Mutt-ng amd64 builds in debian

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 18:05:19 +0100

Because from time to time people ask where are the builds for the AMD64 platform in debian and why there are no builds.
There are builds on:
ftp://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-amd64/debian/pool/main/m/mutt-ng

tagpending

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 15:32:00 +0100

My tool of the day is tagpending from the devscripts package which searches all bugs in a debian changelog file
which will be closed with the next upload via the Closes -tag and mark them automatically as pending in the BTS.

Nice tool!

Automatic debian security updates

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 14:42:32 +0200

Today I thought about a possibility to make automatical package updates for security issues in Debian. You know the problem that you want to fix your packages as fast as possible if you notice an update by the security team? Sometimes it can be too late if you fix the package 5 hours after release. So apt-cron is no solution.

Correct me if something for this problem exists. No I have the plan to write a daemon which checks the RSS feed or a subscription to debian-security-announce in a specified time interval updates the packages automatically if they are installed. So you will have a minimun delay after the DSA was posted.

Any ideas, flames etc.?

Localization rocks because...

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 11:50:34 +0200

... I installed a Debian system in arabic to test some things for our company and it works great.
The desktop environment of choice was KDE with some localisation packages and arabic true type fonts.
The result is a KDE mostly full translated into the arabic language with the use of arabic fonts and arabic regional distinctions.

As you can see in the screenshot (click to enlarge) almost everything is different. The tabs of the konqueror will be opened from the right to the left, the written stuff is from right to the left. If you type text in a text box of your browser the direction is also reversed.
The KDE start button is normally on the left side too by default. Not with localization. Also see the fonts on the desktop.
If you have a look at the konqueror menu you will see that also the menu is on the right side and with these nice arabic fonts.

But the best thing is that also the progress bar of OpenOffice will progress from the right to the left.
See:

This is great, thanks to the people from arabeyes and the debian i18n lists for the effort to make this possible.
I think this is a wonderful thing and I guess that the implementation of localizations for a bunch of languages is not an easy task.

That was the first time I was very thankfull because of all the eyecandy in kde because without it would be unpossible to find a terminal emulator in the menu

New debaday

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 13:05:46 +0200

Unfortunately the old debaday a blog which presents nice peaces of software from the Debian distribution died last year.

David Moreno Garza created one again so here is the new one: http://debaday.debian.net/

Mentors FAQ

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 14:08:58 +0200

Matthew Palmer announced a new version of his very good Mentors FAQ on the debian-mentors list.

I've made several updates to the debian-mentors FAQ in the last few days,
including making mention of sponsors.debian.net, pointing to some revision
control howtos, a comprehensive description of native vs non-native
packages, and a pointer to the REJECT-FAQ (with a list of things to check
for in packages before upload).

This round of changes includes material or suggestions from Paul Wise, Joost
van Baal, Nico Golde, Matthijs Mohlmann, Jamie Jones, and Jay Berkenbilt. I
thank all of them for their contributions.

I'd encourage every new and prospective maintainer to check out the FAQ, and
if anyone has any suggestions on how to improve the FAQ further, I will
endeavour to incorporate your suggestions quicker than I have in the recent
past.

The FAQ is at: http://people.debian.org/~mpalmer/debian-mentors_FAQ.html

Official Debian wiki

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 19:08:47 +0200

In the past the Debian wiki was found on http://wiki.debian.net. The .net services are unofficial services.
There are others like mentors.

Now there is an official wiki on .org. http://wiki.debian.org.
The wiki engine changed from twiki to moinmoin wiki.

My favorite wiki engine would be pmwiki because it doesn't require any database backend.

wmii-2 debian packages

blog@ngolde.de (Nico Golde) — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 14:38:53 +0200

Many people complained that there are no wmii-2 debian packages available.
The reason for this is that wegi was on vacation and temporary unavailable.

Today I made packages for wmii-2. But I dropped the cairo support, cause cairo simply sucks.
I haven't tested the packages yet (only installed them and removed them afterwards) but I think they should work.

Get them by adding
deb http://nion.modprobe.de/deb sarge main
to your /etc/apt/sources.list
Have fun!