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Let's BBQ again, like we did last summer!

It's that time again! Another year, another OMGWTFBBQ! We're expecting 50 or so Debian folks at our place in Cambridge this weekend, ready to natter, geek, socialise and generally have a good time. Let's hope the weather stays nice, but if not we have gazebo technology... :-)

Many thanks to a number of awesome companies and people near and far who are sponsoring the important refreshments for the weekend:

• Mythic Beasts
• Collabora
• Codethink
• QvarnLabs
• Chris Boot

I've even been working on the garden this week to improve it ready for the event. If you'd like to come and haven't already told us, please add yourself to the wiki page!

03:00 :: # :: /debian/uk :: 0 comments

-1, Trolling

Here's a nice comment I received by email this morning. I guess somebody was upset by my last post?

From: Tec Services <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2017 22:30:26 -0700
To: [email protected]
Subject: its time for you to retire from debian...unbelievable..your
         the quality guy and fucked up the installer!

i cant ever remember in the hostory of computing someone releasing an installer
that does not work!!

wtf!!!

you need to be retired...due to being retarded..

and that this was dedicated to ian...what a
disaster..you should be ashames..he is probably roling in his grave from shame
right now....

It's nice to be appreciated.

22:59 :: # :: /misc :: 8 comments

So, Stretch happened...

Things mostly went very well, and we've released Debian 9 this weekend past. Many many people worked together to make this possible, and I'd like to extend my own thanks to all of them.

As a project, we decided to dedicate Stretch to our late founder Ian Murdock. He did much of the early work to get Debian going, and inspired many more to help him. I had the good fortune to meet up with Ian years ago at a meetup attached to a Usenix conference, and I remember clearly he was a genuinely nice guy with good ideas. We'll miss him.

For my part in the release process, again I was responsible for producing our official installation and live images. Release day itself went OK, but as is typical the process ran late into Saturday night / early Sunday morning. We made and tested lots of different images, although numbers were down from previous releases as we've stopped making the full CD sets now.

Sunday was the day for the release party in Cambridge. As is traditional, a group of us met up at a local hostelry for some revelry! We hid inside the pub to escape from the ridiculouly hot weather we're having at the moment.

Due to a combination of the lack of sleep and the heat, I nearly forgot to even take any photos - apologies to the extra folks who'd been around earlier whom I missed with the camera... :-(

23:21 :: # :: /debian/releases :: 2 comments

Fonts and presentations

When you're giving a presentation, the choice of font can matter a lot. Not just in terms of how pretty your slides look, but also in terms of whether the data you're presenting is actually properly legible. Unfortunately, far too many fonts are appallingly bad if you're trying to tell certain characters apart. Imagine if you're at the back of a room, trying to read information on a slide that's (typically) too small and (if you're unlucky) the presenter's speech is also unclear to you (noisy room, bad audio, different language). A good clear font is really important here.

To illustrate the problem, I've picked a few fonts available in Google Slides. I've written the characters "1lIoO0" (that's one, lower case L, upper case I, lower case o, upper case O, zero) in each of those fonts. Some of the sans-serif fonts in particular are comically bad for trying to distinguish between these characters.

It may not matter in all cases if your audience can read all the characters on your slides and tell them apart, put if you're trying to present scientific or numeric results it's critical. Please consider that before looking for a pretty font.

23:08 :: # :: /misc :: 2 comments

Start the fans please!

This probably won't mean much to people outside the UK, I'm guessing. Sorry! :-)

The Crystal Maze was an awesome fun game show on TV in the UK in the 1990s. Teams would travel through differently-themed zones, taking on challenges to earn crystals for later rewards in the Crystal Dome. I really enjoyed it, as did just about everybody my age that I know of...

A group have started up a new Crystal Maze attraction in London and Manchester, giving some of us a chance of indulging our nostalgia directly in a replica of the show's setup! Neil NcGovern booked a load of tickets and arranged for a large group of people to go along this weekend.

It was amazing! (Sorry!) I ended up captaining one of the 4 teams, and our team ("Failure is always an option!") scored highest in the final game - catching bits of gold foil flying around in the Dome. It was really, really fun and I'd heartily recommend it to other folks who like action games and puzzle solving.

I just missed the biting scorn of the original show presenter, Richard O'Brien, but our "Maze Master" Boudica was great fun and got us all pumped up and working together.

00:32 :: # :: /misc :: 2 comments

Twenty years...

So, it's now been twenty years since I became a Debian Developer. I couldn't remember the exact date I signed up, but I decided to do some forensics to find out. First, I can check on the dates on my first Debian system, as I've kept it running as a Debian system ever since!

jack:~$ ls -alt /etc
...
-rw-r--r--   1 root   root     6932 Feb 10  1997 pine.conf.old
-rw-r--r--   1 root   root     6907 Dec 29  1996 pine.conf.old2
-rw-r--r--   1 root   root    76739 Dec  7  1996 mailcap.old
-rw-r--r--   1 root   root     1225 Oct 20  1996 fstab.old
jack:~$

I know that I did my first Debian installation in late October 1996, migrating over from my existing Slackware installation with the help of my friend Jon who was already a DD. That took an entire weekend and it was painful, so much so that several times that weekend I very nearly bailed and went back. But, I stuck with it and after a few more days I decided I was happier with Debian than with the broken old Slackware system I'd been using. That last file (fstab.old) is the old fstab file from the Slackware system, backed up just before I made the switch.

I was already a software developer at the time, so of course the first thing I wanted to do once I was happy with Debian was to become a DD and take over the Debian maintenance of mikmod, the module player I was working on at the time. So, I mailed Bruce to ask for an account (there was none of this NM concept back then!) and I think he replied the next day. Unfortunately, I don't have the email in my archives any more due to a disk crash back in the dim and distant past. But I can see that the first PGP key I generated for the sake of joining Debian dates from October 30th 1996 which gives me a date of 31st October 1996 for joining Debian.

Twenty years, wow... Since then, I've done lots in the project. I'm lucky enough to been to 11 DebConfs, hosted all around the world. I'm massively proud to have been voted DPL for two of those twenty years. I've worked on a huge number of different things in Debian, from the audio applications I started with to the installer (yay, how things come back to bite you!), from low-level CD and DVD tools (and making our CD images!) to a wiki engine written in python. I've worked hard to help make the best Operating System on the planet, both for my own sake and the sake of our users.

Debian has been both excellent fun and occasionally a huge cause of stress in my life for the last 20 years, but despite the latter I wouldn't go back and change anything. Why? Through Debian, I've made some great friends: in Cambridge, in the UK, in Europe, on every continent. Thanks to you all, and here's to (hopefully) many years to come!

00:17 :: # :: /debian/stats :: 2 comments

Time flies

Slightly belated...

Another year, another OMGWTFBBQ. By my count, we had 49 people (and a dog) in my house and garden at the peak on Saturday evening. It was excellent to see people from all over coming together again, old friends and new. This year we had some weather issues, but due to the delights of gazebo technology most people stayed mostly dry. :-)

Also: thanks to a number of companies near and far who sponsored the important refreshments for the weekend:

• Mythic Beasts
• Metail
• Collabora
• Codethink
• QvarnLabs

As far as I could tell, everybody enjoyed themselves; I know I definitely did!

16:57 :: # :: /debian/uk :: 2 comments

And about time, too!

A couple of weekends back, we had an awesome time at Jonathan and Charlene's wedding. I'd have blogged sooner, but I had to wait for this photo of the happy couple with the Debian gang... :-)

Unfortunately, somebody let Charlene hide at the back! Follow the link for more photos...

14:54 :: # :: /misc :: 2 comments

Supporting the Software Freedom Conservancy too!

I'm happy to chip in and help the awesome folks at the Software Freedom Conservancy with funding for their work, standing up for copyleft. It's clear that there are a lot of people who will ignore the terms of Free Software licensing, whether by oversight or deliberately, so the SFC are doing an important job working to defend the Freedoms that lots of us are using every day as developers and users.

It seems that some of SFC's corporate supporters have stopped sponsorship since the beginning of their lawsuit in Germany against VMware for GPL violations. Maybe some folks are happy to support SFC, but not when they really push things like this. Let's hope that we can find many more individual supporters to cover SFC's funding needs instead. This week, there's an anonymous pledge to match donations from new supporters so right now is an even better time to sign up!

Thanks to Paul Wise for posting about this and indirectly prodding me to sign up too.

21:19 :: # :: /debian/sfc :: 2 comments

Linaro VLANd v0.4

VLANd is a python program intended to make it easy to manage port-based VLAN setups across multiple switches in a network. It is designed to be vendor-agnostic, with a clean pluggable driver API to allow for a wide range of different switches to be controlled together.

There's more information in the README file. I've just released v0.4, with a lot of changes included since the last release:

• Large numbers of bugfixes and code cleanups
• Code changes for integration with LAVA:
  • Added db.find_lowest_unused_vlan_tag()
  • create_vlan() with a tag of -1 will find and allocate the first unused tag automatically
• Add port numbers as well as names to the ports database, to give human-recognisable references. See README.port-numbering for more details.
• Add tracking of trunks, the inter-switch connections, needed for visualisation diagrams.
• Add a simple http-based visualisation feature:
  • Generate network diagrams on-demand based on the information in the VLANd database, colour-coded to show port configuration
  • Generate a simple website to reference those diagrams.
• Allow more ports to be seen on Catalyst switches
• Add a systemd service file for vland

VLANd is Free Software, released under the GPL version 2 (or any later version). For now, grab it from git; tarballs will be coming shortly.

01:44 :: # :: /linaro :: 2 comments

New UEFI team in Debian

We've just started a new team in Debian for maintaining our UEFI packages together, with git repositories in a shared project on alioth etc. We're just working out the exact details of how we're going to manage things, but for now we've moved the following packages under the team's umbrella:

• efibootmgr
• efivar
• fwupd
• fwupdate
• pesign

and in the future we'll clearly end up adding more. We've also started a new IRC channel (#debian-efi) on irc.debian.org aka irc.oftc.net. New members always welcome to help with the work here!

00:40 :: # :: /debian/efi :: 1 comment

Tracking broken UEFI implementations

There can be issues with shipping installer images including UEFI. But they're mainly due to crappy UEFI implementations that vendors have shipped. It's fairly well-known that Apple have shipped some really shoddy firmware over the years, and to allow people to install Debian on older Apple x86 machines we've now added the workaround of a non-UEFI 32-bit installer image too. But Apple aren't the only folks shipping systems with horrendously buggy UEFI, and a lot of Linux folks have had to deal with this over the last few years.

I've been talking to a number of other UEFI developers lately, and we've agreed to start a cross-distro resource to help here - a list of known-broken UEFI implementations so that we can share our experiences. The place for this in in the OSDev wiki at http://wiki.osdev.org/Broken_UEFI_implementations. We're going to be adding new information here as we find it. If you've got a particular UEFI horror story on your own broken system, then please either add details there or let me know and I'll try to do it for you.

00:40 :: # :: /debian/efi :: 3 comments

Justifying 32-bit UEFI on 64-bit Intel hardware, and tracking broken UEFI implementations

You might have seen some of the posts I've written in the last few months about adding support in Debian for so-called Mixed-EFI systems like the Intel Bay Trail: a 64-bit processor shipped with a 32-bit EFI implementation.

I've finally seen a public justification from Intel evangelist Brian Richardson as to why these systems are crippled^Wconfigured this way, and it's nice to see our guesses confirmed. The reason is simply cost - like most consumer PCs shipped today, they come with Windows. In terms of system design, it's cheaper to just include the limited memory and storage needed for 32-bit Windows. 64-bit Windows takes a lot more storage in particular. And on modern systems 32-bit Windows can only boot using 32-bit UEFI. Fair enough...

However, Brian goes on to state some more things that are simply out of date, saying that "Linux support for UEFI IA32 is still an unanswered question". Ummm, Brian: we've got working 32-bit x86 UEFI support in our standard Jessie (and newer) installation images already, and they work just fine on CD/DVD or USB stick. We've even gone one stage further than anybody else (thus far!) in adding easy support for running a full 64-bit Linux system on top of those 32-bit UEFI implementations.

I say "thus far" here because all the work here here is Free Software. Other folks added the support in Linux for making a 64-bit kernel work with a 32-bit UEFI; I added code in Linux to expose some of the details to userspace, and code in Grub to work with it. My changes have gone upstream already, so I'd expect to see other distros like Fedora or Ubuntu also using them soon.

00:40 :: # :: /debian/efi :: 1 comment

Linaro VLANd v0.3

VLANd is a python program intended to make it easy to manage port-based VLAN setups across multiple switches in a network. It is designed to be vendor-agnostic, with a clean pluggable driver API to allow for a wide range of different switches to be controlled together.

There's more information in the README file. I've just released v0.3, with a lot of changes included since the last release:

• Massive numbers of bugfixes and code cleanups
• Added two new switch drivers:
  • TP-Link TL-SG2XXX family (TPLinkTLSG2XXX)
  • Netgear XSM family (NetgearXSM)
• Added "debug" option to all the switch drivers to log all interactions
• Added internal caching of port modes within the driver core for a large speed-up in normal use
• Bug fix to handling of trunk ports in the CiscoCatalyst driver, improving VLAN interop with other switches
• Huge changes to the test lab, now using 5 switches and 10 hosts
• Big improvements to the test suite:
  • Match the new test lab layout
  • Move more of the core test code into the test-common utility library
  • Massively improved the check-networks test runner for the test hosts
  • Added parsing of the UP/DOWN results in test-common to give a simple PASS/FAIL result for each test
  • Added more tests
• All logging now in UTC

VLANd is Free Software, released under the GPL version 2 (or any later version). For now, grab it from git; tarballs will be coming shortly.

17:04 :: # :: /linaro :: 1 comment

Quick trip to Sweden

Jo and I spent a few days in Sweden and had an awesome time! The main reason for being there was Leif and Maria's wedding way up north in Skellefteå. They cunningly organised their ceremony for the Midsummer weekend, which was an excellent plan - we had a full weekend of partying while we were there. :-)

We had some time to ourselves while we were there, so we wandered about a little and got to see some of the beautiful coastal countryside.

Then on the way home we stopped off in Umeå to visit Mattias Wadenstein (maswan) and his wife Melanie, and he showed me around some of the machines that he's been admining on behalf of Debian. Maybe I'm a sad geek, but I feel quite a bond with one of the machines there, pettersson.debian.org. It's the official CD build machine for Debian, and I've been responsible for thrashing it really hard for the last 5 years or so... :-)

Massive thanks to the University of Umeå and their Academic Computer Club for hosting Debian machines and serving all the CD images for us!

The only downsides from the trip were the massive tiredness (midnight sun is pretty, but notconducive to sleep!) the mosquito bites and the nasty plague^Wcold that we picked up while we were there... Ah well. :-)

01:06 :: # :: /travel :: 1 comment

Debian-branded USB keys

I've had some 8GB USB keys made, with the Debian swirl and text. By buying a reasonable number, I've got what I think is a good price for nice high-quality keys (metal body with a solid loop for attaching to a keyring). I'm now selling these for 7 pounds each, and I'm planning on bringing some to DebConf 15 too, where they'll be 10 EUR.

They're selling faster than I expected - if you're interested in buying one (or several!), please let me know. If there's enough demand, I may order more.

12:32 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 1 comment

Easier installation of Jessie on the Applied Micro X-Gene

As shipped, Debian Jessie (8.0) did not include kernel support for the USB controller on APM X-Gene based machines like the Mustang. In fact, at the time of writing this that support has not yet gone upstream into the mainline Linux kernel either but patches have been posted by Mark Langsdorf from Red Hat.

This means that installing Debian is more awkward than it could be on these machines. They don't have optical drives fitted normally, so the neat isohybrid CD images that we have made in Debian so far won't work very well at all. Booting via UEFI from a USB stick will work, but then the installer won't be able to read from the USB stick at all and you're stuck. :-( The best way so far for installing Debian is to do a network installation using tftp etc.

Well, until now... :-)

I've patched the Debian Jessie kernel, then re-built the installer and a netinst image to use them. I've put a copy of that image up at http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/arm64-mustang/ with more instructions on how to use it. I'm just submitting the patch for inclusion into the Jessie stable kernel, hopefully ready to go into the 8.1 point release.

12:18 :: # :: /debian/arm :: 1 comment

Ready for Jessie! (aka bits from the debian-cd team)

I'm happy with the progress we've made for debian-installer and related packages for the Jessie release. We're going to end up with a release that's better in a number of ways than what we've had before.

1. Big EFI enhancements

I've already blogged a lot about the stuff I've worked on here, so I'll just summarise for now some of the improvements we've got over Wheezy.

1. A fix for systems that (badly) dual-boot in EFI and BIOS mode such that after installing Debian you wouldn't get a sensible choice of which OS to boot (#763127).
2. A workaround for broken EFI implementations: an option to install the grub-efi bootloader to the removable media path in case the system firmware does not load grub-efi from the correctly registered boot path. (#746662).
3. Addition of 32-bit EFI to our i386 installation images, to support both some older systems and some brand new systems that need it. This has unfortunately stopped those i386 images from working on some of the oldest Intel-based Apple Mac machines, so we've added an extra Mac-only flavour of i386 netinst without EFI in case people need it.
4. Significantly better support for Intel-based Apple Macs in general, to the point that installing Debian on lots of these machines should now be much easier and doesn't depend on extra third-party software such as rEFIt or rEFInd. I've massively updated the Debian wiki page at https://wiki.debian.org/MacMiniIntel with more details for specific models of Mac Mini. I'm hoping to provide similarly updated information for Mac laptops too - see below!
   Massive thanks to the lovely folks at Mythic Beasts for providing me with a range of machines to test with here!
5. Support for mixed-mode EFI systems like the Intel Bay Trail: a 64-bit platform crippled with a 32-bit EFI firmware. I believe Jessie will be the first release of a Linux distribution to support these machines fully!

2. Openstack images

In collaboration with Thomas Goirand, we now have amd64 Openstack Jessie image builds being produced every week, and there will be an official image made to go with the Jessie release too. See http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/openstack/testing/ for the current image.

3. Debian-live images

As of a few weeks ago, we've also added started doing weekly builds of live Debian images for amd64 and i386, using software and configuration from the Live Systems Project. See http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-live-builds/ for the current weekly images. These will be produced in sync with the Jessie release too.

4. New architectures

We've added installation media for the two new architectures added in Jessie: arm64 and ppc64el.

I'm particularly proud of the arm64 images. With help from Ian Campbell, Leif Lindholm and Thomas Schmitt I've managed to make EFI-compatible CD images in an isohybrid design that means they should also work when copied directly to a USB stick. Hopefully this will help this new platform to become just as easy to install as any x86 PC is today.

Hopefully post-Jessie we'll even be able to start providing live images and openstack images for more architectures too.

More help needed yet!

First of all, we're planning to release Jessie as Debian 8 this coming Saturday (25th April). Help with testing the installation and live images as they're produced would be lovely - please join us on the #debian-cd channel on irc.debian.org and we'll co-ordinate there.

Secondly, there's an almost endless variety of machines out there. I've updated information about how Debian installation works on some of the more awkward Mac Mini machines, but we don't yet cover all the bases even there. It would be great to update the information about other machines such as the Macbook range as well - currently a lot of these pages are well out of date and won't be helpful for new users. Please test on machines if you have them, and help improve Debian's documentation here.

01:10 :: # :: /debian/CDs :: 6 comments

More arm64 hardware for Debian - Applied Micro X-Gene

As a follow-up to my post about bootstrapping arm64 in Debian, we've had more hardware given to Debian for us to use in porting and building packages for arm64. Applied Micro sent me an X-Gene development machine to set up and use. Unfortunately, the timing was unlucky and the machine sat on my desk unopened for a few weeks while I was on long holiday in Australia. Once I was back, I connected it up and got it working. Out of the box, a standard Jessie arm64 installation worked using network boot (dhcp and tftp). I ran through d-i as normal and installed a working system, then handed it over to the DSA and buildd folks to get the machine integrated into our systems. Easy! The machine is now up and running as arm-arm-03.debian.org and has been building packages for a few weeks now. You can see the stats here on the buildd.debian.org site.

In terms of installation, I also got the machine to boot using one of our netinst images on a USB stick, but that path didn't get very far. The USB drivers for this hardware have only quite recently gone into the mainline kernel, and haven't been backported to the Debian Jessie kernel yet. I'm hoping to get those included shortly. There's also an option to replace the U-Boot firmware that came with the X-Gene with UEFI instead, which would be much more helpful for a server platform like this. I'll look into doing that upgrade soon too, but probably after the Jessie release is done. I don't want to jinx things just now. *grin*

Thanks to APM for their generous donation here, and particularly to Richard Zenkert for his help in getting this machine shipped to us.

17:09 :: # :: /debian/arm :: 6 comments

UEFI Debian installer work for Jessie, part 6

One final update on my work for UEFI improvements in Jessie!

All of my improvements have been committed into the various Debian packages involved, and the latest release candidate for Jessie's debian-installer build (RC2) works just as well as my test builds on the Bay Trail system I've been using (Asus X205TA). Job done! :-)

I'm still hoping to maybe get more hardware support for this particular hardware included in Jessie, but I can't promise. The mixed EFI work has also improved things for a lot of Mac users, and I'm planning to write up a more comprehensive list of supported machines in the Debian wiki (for now).

There's now no need to use any of the older test installer images - please switch to RC2 for now. See http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/jessie_di_rc2/ for the images. If you want to install a 64-bit system with the 32-bit UEFI support, make sure you use the multi-arch amd64/i386 netinst or DVD. Otherwise, any of the standard i386 images should work for a 32-bit only system.

Upstreaming

My kernel patch to add the new /sys file was accepted upstream a while back, and has been in Linus' master branch for some time. It'll be in 4.0 unless something goes horribly wrong, and as it's such a tiny piece of code it's trivial to backport to anything remotely recent too.

I've also just seen that my patch for grub2 to use this new /sys file has been accepted upstream this week. Again, the change is small and self-contained so should be easy to copy across into other trees too.

Mixed EFI systems should now have better support across all distros in the near future, I hope.

02:44 :: # :: /debian/CDs :: 11 comments