linux & the mountains

Building reverse build dependencies in salsa CI

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 15:33:00 +0000

For the next library soname bump of gpsd I needed to rebuild all reverse dependencies. As this is a task I have to do very often, I came up with some code to generate (and keep uptodate) an include for the gitlab CI. Right now it is rather uncommented, undocumented, but works well. If you like it, MRs are very welcome.

https://salsa.debian.org/bzed/reverse-dependency-ci/

The generated files are here:

https://bzed.pages.debian.net/reverse-dependency-ci/

Usage:


include:
 - https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/raw/master/salsa-ci.yml
 - https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/raw/master/pipeline-jobs.yml
 - https://bzed.pages.debian.net/reverse-dependency-ci/gpsd.yml

variables:
 SALSA_CI_ENABLE_REVERSE_DEPENDENCY_BUILD: 1

Please do no abuse the salsa CI. Don’t build all of your 100 reverse dependencies with every commit!

Public service annoucement for a modern Debian

Sun, 08 Dec 2019 01:48:00 +0000

Don’t forget to vote!


echo "
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
7b77e0f2-4ff9-4adb-85e4-af249191f27a
[ 1 ] Choice 1: F: Focus on systemd
[ 2 ] Choice 2: B: Systemd but we support exploring alternatives
[ 5 ] Choice 3: A: Support for multiple init systems is Important
[ 6 ] Choice 4: D: Support non-systemd systems, without blocking progress
[ 4 ] Choice 5: H: Support portability, without blocking progress
[ 7 ] Choice 6: E: Support for multiple init systems is Required
[ 8 ] Choice 7: G: Support portability and multiple implementations
[ 3 ] Choice 8: Further Discussion
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

" | gpg --clearsign | mail gr_initsystems@vote.debian.org

Collecting statistics from TP-Link HS110 SmartPlugs using collectd

Wed, 13 Dec 2017 18:15:00 +0000

Running a 3d printer alone at home is not necessarily the best idea - so I was looking for a way to force it off from remote. As OctoPrint user I stumbled upon a plugin to control TP-Link Smartplugs, so I decided to give them a try. What I found especially nice on the HS110 model was that it is possible to monitor power usage, current and voltage. Of course I wanted to have a long term graph of it. The result is a small collectd plugin, written in Python. It is available on github: https://github.com/bzed/collectd-tplink_hs110.

Enjoy!

Connecting your 3D printer to OctoPrint automatically

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 14:35:00 +0000

Recently I joined the group of 3d printer owners and OctoPrint users. After some days I got annoyed by the fact that so far nobody seems to have thought about automatically connecting a printer to OctoPrint after turning the printer on. If you start OctoPrint after your printer, everything works fine. But here OctoPrint runs 24/7 but I turn off the printer when it is done with printing.

My solution of the problem is based on udev and systemd and should work on most recent Linux installations. I’ve only tested it on Debian Stretch, though. I’m using the same paths and users as in the official OctoPrint on Raspian setup documentation. Make sure to change the user/group and path names if you have a different installation.

Talking to the OctoPrint API

First we need a script to talk to the OctoPrint API to issue a connect command. For that you need to copy the API key from your OctoPrint User settings, also I’m passing the baudrate for my printer, just in case. If OctoPrint ist not listening on localhost port 5000 make sure to change the URL, too. For details and other optins please read the API documentation and change the code accordingly.

Save the script to /home/pi/connect_octoprint.py.

#!/home/pi/OctoPrint/venv/bin/python

OCTOPRINT_URL = 'http://localhost:5000/api/connection'
API_KEY = 'AAABBB000YOURAPIKEYHERE000BBBAAA'
BAUDRATE = 115200


import requests
import sys

port = sys.argv[1]
headers = {'X-Api-Key': API_KEY}
json = {
  "command": "connect",
  "port": port,
  "baudrate": BAUDRATE,
}

r = requests.post(
        OCTOPRINT_URL,
        json=json,
        headers=headers
)

if (r.status_code == 204):
    sys.exit(0)
else:
    print(r)
    sys.exit(1)

From now on you’ll need root permissions to continue, so use sudo bash or login as root.

Creating a new systemd service

The next thing we need is a systemd service to execute the script. Drop the following snippet into /etc/systemd/system/octoprint_connect@.service (yes, the @ in the file name is important!).

[Unit]
Description=Connect printer to OctoPrint automatically
BindsTo=dev-%i.device
After=dev-%i.device

[Service]
Type=oneshot
User=pi
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStart=/home/pi/connect_octoprint.py /dev/%I

To let systemd know about the new service, run systemctl daemon-reload.

Handling udev events

Finally we need to configure udev to notify systemd as soon as the 3d printer USB device is being connected. For that we need to know the Verndor and Product ID of the printer’s USB port. Normally it will be some kind of USB-Serial converter.

To find it, run

lsusb -v | grep -iE ‘(^bus|idvendor|idproduct)'

You should find lines similar to the following entry:

Bus 001 Device 035: ID 0403:6001 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd FT232 USB-Serial (UART) IC
  idVendor           0x0403 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd
  idProduct          0x6001 FT232 USB-Serial (UART) IC

If you have no clue which Device your 3d printer is, run lsusb when it is turned off and again after turning it on and compare the output.

In my example the idVendor is 0403 and the idProduct 6001. Create /etc/udev/rules.d/3dprinter.rules and change my example to match your printer’s ids.

KERNEL=="tty*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0403", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6001", \
    TAG+="systemd", ENV{SYSTEMD_WANTS}="octoprint_connect@%k.service"

Udev will reload automatically and use the rule - if the syntax is correct.

Give it a try

Try to powercycle the printer and see if it is connected to OctoPrint automatically. If you’ve done everything right, it should be ready for printing.

Debugging

Debugging this in case it does not work is not a trivial task, but a good start is to look into the log/output of OctoPrint, maybe the authorization did not work. Next place to look at is systemd. Running

_systemctl list-units ‘octoprint_connect*'_

will show you the name of the automatically created service. If there is one, you can see its output by running

journalctl -u octoprint_connect@XXXXXX.service

(replace XXXXXX properly from the systemctl output from above. Details about debugging udev are in the Arch wiki.

Enjoy!

bzed-letsencrypt puppet module

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 19:55:01 +0000

With the announcement of the Let’s Encrypt dns-01 challenge support we finally had a way to retrieve certificates for those hosts where http challenges won’t work. Also it allows to centralize the signing procedure to avoid the installation and maintenance of letsencrypt clients on all hosts.

For an implementation I had the following requirements in my mind:

Handling of key/csr generation and certificate signing by puppet.
Private keys don’t leave the host they were generated on. If they need to (for HA setups and similar cases), handling needs to be done outside of the letsencrypt puppet module.
Deployment and cleanup of tokens in our DNS infrastructure should be easy to implement and maintain.

After reading trough the source code of various letsencrypt client implementations I decided to use letsencrypt.sh. Mainly because its dependencies are available pretty much everywhere and adding the necessary hook is as simple as writing some lines of code in your favourite (scripting) language. My second favourite was lego, but I wanted to avoid shipping binaries with puppet, so golang was not an option.

It took me some days to find enough spare time to write the necessary puppet code, but finally I managed to release a working module today. It is still not perfect, but the basic tasks are implemented and the whole key/csr/signing chain works pretty well.

And if your hook can handle it, http-01 challenges are possible, too!

Please give the module a try and send patches if you would like to help to improve it!

Puppet Forge: https://forge.puppetlabs.com/bzed/letsencrypt
Github: https://github.com/bzed/bzed-letsencrypt
Issue tracker: https://github.com/bzed/bzed-letsencrypt/issues

open-vm-tools updated

Mon, 04 Jan 2016 10:06:01 +0000

In January 2014 the open-vm-tools package was orphaned and I took the chance to take over the maintenance. Unfortunately the package is still not 100% in the shape I’d like to see it, but I’m getting closer. I have to say Thank You for a lot of good bug reports, especially for those use cases which are hard to test/reproduce for me (running Debian in a Windows-based VMware Workstation Player for example….).

At conova communications GmbH, the company I work for, we are using the package on all of our Debian VMs, both for customer and internal use. It is essential for us to have properly working open-vm-tools - not only to be able to shutdown the VM from VMware vCenter, but also because tools like vSphere Data Protection and Veeam depend on it. Good thing is that I can work on and test the package at work and breakages are detected early and fast normally.

Getting a good contact to the VMware upstream was easy and the developers there are helpful and reply pretty fast to their emails. Also as it seems there are finally “real” commits showing up in the open-vm-tools github repository again, not only huge single commits with a full release. It is not only nice to see that they are moving into the right direction again, but also this is really helpful in fixing (urgent) bugs before the next release of open-vm-tools - or to backport a fix to the versoin in stable/oldstable.

Since a few days we have open-vm-tools 10.0.5-3227872 in

testing & unstable
jessie-backports
wheezy-backports-sloppy

If you are using VMware ESX 5.5 or newer, you should upgrade to the backports versions. Same if you use a recent VMware player version.

Please note that since 10.0.0 the open-vm-dkms package is only necessary if you need the legacy vmxnet module. This is only the case if you are using very old VM hardware versions. vmxnet3 is shipped in the Debian kernel, so you don’t need to compile extra modules to use it. The vmhgfs module was replaced by a fuse-based implementation.

If you’d like to help maintaining the package, please send bugs/patches via the Debian BTS or even better - send pull requests for pkg-open-vm-tools. The repository is mirrored to git.bzed.at in case you want to avoid github.

bzed.de online again

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 19:41:06 +0000

Finally, bzed.de is back online and I’m planning to start blogging again! Part of the reason why I became inactive was the usage of ikiwiki, which is great, but at end unnecessarily complicated. So I’ve migrated by page to gohugo.io - a static website generator, written in go. Hugo has an active community and it is easy to create themes for it or to enhance it. Also it is using plain Markdown syntax instead of special ikiwiki syntax mixed into it - should make it easy to migrate away again if necessary.

In case somebody else would like to convert from ikiwiki to Hugo, here is the script I’ve hacked together to migrate my old blog posts.


#!/bin/bash

find . -type f -name '*.mdwn' | while read i; do
    tmp=`mktemp`
    {
        echo '+++'
        slug="$(echo $i | sed 's,.*/,,;s,\.mdwn$,,')"
        echo "slug = \"${slug}\""
        echo "title = \"$(echo $i | sed 's,.*/,,;s,\.mdwn$,,;s,_, ,g;s/\b\(.\)/\u\1/;s,debian,Debian,g')\""
        if grep -q 'meta updated' $i; then
            echo -n 'date = '
            sed '/meta updated/!d;/.*meta updated.*/s,.*=",,;s,".*,,;s,^,",;s,$,",' $i
        else
            echo -n 'date = '
            git log --diff-filter=A --follow --format='"%aI"' -1 -- $i
        fi
        if grep -q '\[\[!tag' $i; then
            echo -n 'tags ='
            sed '/\[\[!tag/!d;s,[^ ]*tag ,,;s,\]\],,;s,\([^ ]*\),"\1",g;s/ /,/g;s,^,[,;s,$,],' $i
        fi
        echo 'categories = ["linux"]'
        echo 'draft = false'
        echo '+++'
        echo ''

        sed -e '/\[\[!tag/d' \
            -e '/meta updated/d' \
            -e '/\[\[!plusone *\]\]/d' \
            -e 's,\[\[!img files[0-9/]*/\([^ ]*\) alt="\([^"]*\).*,![\2](../\1),g' \
            -e 's,\[\([^]]*\)\](\([^)]*\)),[\1](\2),g' \
            -e 's,\[\[\([^|]*\)|\([^]]*\)\]\],[\1](\2),g' \
            $i
    } > $tmp
    #cat $tmp; rm $tmp 
    mv $tmp `echo $i | sed 's,\.mdwn,.md,g'`
done

For the planet Debian readers - only linux related posts will show up on the planet. If you are interested in my mountain activities and other things I post, please follow my blog on bzed.de directly.

Report from the Bug Squashing Party in Salzburg

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Participation and Results

From June 15-17th we held a Debian BugSquashingParty in Salzburg, hosted and sponsored by conova communications GmbH. It was a fun and busy weekend, with 15-17 people from 5 countries being around, mainly working on RC bugs in Testing/Unstable. Gerfried Fuchs (rhonda) also worked on triaging the impact of RC bugs on the version in Squeeze, while Peter Palfrader (weasel) took care of Tor related things and Debian sysadmin work, including starting on the new bugs and udd hosts. Phillip Hug (hug) worked on the debian.ch infrastructure. Together with Miroslav Suchý from Red Hat Bernd Zeimetz (bzed) worked on the packaging of the necessary libraries and daemons to add (basic) Spacewalk client support to Debian. As soon as the packages passed NEW and #677871 was applied (thanks to the APT guys for working on that already), managing Debian clients with Spacewalk should work out of the box. Of course we also had a little keysigning party :)

Statistics

about 68 bugs in unstable/testing were triaged/patched/fixed or at least pinged
54 bugs were tagged to show if they affect Squeeze, several other bugs were pinged to retrieve necessary information or to trigger an update in the next stable pointrelease.
5 packages were introduced into Debian (still in NEW, though) - the Spacewalk client related packages and libapache2-mod-auth-memcookie.

Accomodation

Thanks to Debian funds we were able to provide accomodation for four participants in the JUFA youth hostel in Salzburg. We had paid in advance for eight, but changing to rooms with a higher category for only 4 people would have been equally or more expensive.

Press/Media coverage

Additionally to being mentioned in the calendars on ProLinux and similar pages, we had some press coverage by the local newspaper and online magazines:

Fun facts

We consumed 2kg of Leberkas, a big plate of “Buchteln mit Vanillesosse”, about 16000cm^2 of Pizza, about 80 litres of coke, juice, beer and wine and I guess we drank at least the same amount of water. We had coffee made of 1.5kg coffee beans and managed to empty the (formerly well filled) icemaker in the fridge. Also we had successful training sessions of a standard Debconf game (rules won’t be explained here obviously). Maybe we even successfully spread the game to the employees of a commercial linux distribution ;)

Bug squashing party in Salzburg

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Just as a little reminder, the Bug Squashing Party in Salzburg will start in three days. We still have sponsored accomodation for ~~five~~ four people left, so don’t hesitate to come! Squashing as many RC bugs for Wheezy as possible is on the TODO list for the weekend! Also we’ll work on making Debian a proper Spacewalk client. This might be a bit too late for Wheezy, but there will be backports :)

See YOU in Salzburg!

Working on spacewalk support for and in Debian

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 21:38:00 +0000

With the latest release of Spacewalk PostgreSQL seems to be supported properly

finally. Also there are efforts to support Debian as a client system. So I’m thinking about using the upcoming BugSquashingParty in Salzburg to
- analyze the current support of Debian as a client in Spacewalk and maybe work on a better integration
- finalize the packaging and upload the client packages which were prepared by Miroslav Suchý (I hope he will be able to join us!)
- maybe work on packaging the server side of Spacewalk for Debian (Java is involved, so it would be great to have somebody form the Java team around!)

in the hope that you (yes, you!) are joining me! Please let me know if you are interested to work on Spacewalk related packages, even if you are not able to come to Salzburg.

Nagios-plugins-contrib released

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:47:19 +0000

Nagios or Icinga users probably know the problem that neither the default plugin packages (nagios-plugins-basic and -standard) nor the few other plugin packages ship all the plugins you need to monitor your hardware and software properly. And unless you have puppet, cfengine or some other automation software, you probably just start searching plugins on Nagios Exchange, MonitoringExchange or some other machines you are monitoring already.

Your problem shall be solved! nagios-plugins-contrib passed NEW today. It is a collection of various useful plugins, maintained within the Debian Nagios Maintainer Group. So far it contains only 6 plugins (check_email_delivery, check_ipmi_sensor, check_lm_sensors, check_memcached, check_raid, check_rbl), but more are going to come.

To have your favorite plugins added to the package we would like to encourage you to send pull requests, either using github, alioth or your personal repository. Please keep in mind that you’ll be added to the Uploaders of the package automatically to ensure that you keep your plugin updated and in a good shape. See debian/README.source for some instructions on adding new plugins. Unmaintained plugins will be removed! Of course you can also submit bug reports to have a new plugin added, but you have to convince somebody to maintain it for you (or that he wants to use the plugin and needs to maintain it therefore :) ).

We might also also have a similar package in contrib as a lot of commonly used plugins require non-free software, so don’t hesitate to prepare plugins for inclusion in such a package and let us know!

Suggestions and ideas for improvement are always welcome. And so is help to maintain the packages!

Re-indenting files with vim

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 17:28:45 +0200

Sometimes projects with a long history of committers tend to collect various styles of indentation. Unfortunately not for all programming languages exist specialized tools like indent for C/C++, so we need to find a different way to mass-indent files properly. Using vim is one of them.

First you need to create a file (let’s call it /tmp/indent.vim) including all the vim commands you want to run on your code. The following piece is a good start:


gg=G
:x!

Now run vim on your source code files, using the created vim script file. The following example reindents all .php files in the current folder and subfolders


find . -name '*.php' -exec vim -s /tmp/indent.vim {} \;

If you don’t like the result it might be that the indentation settings in you .vimrc don’t suit your needs. Of course you are able to add other fancy vim commands to modify your files - like adding or modifying copyright headers.

Plusone button plugin for ikiwiki

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 16:29:32 +0200

Just published an ikiwiki plugin to add google’s +1 buttons. See ikiwiki.info/plugins/contrib/plusone/ for details.

And if you enable html5 in your ikiwiki settings, it won’t show up on planet debian as ugly g:plusone tag.

Merkaartor development version in experimental

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 15:28:22 +0000

For people who do not follow the Merkaartor mailing list: Regulary updated development snapshots are available in experimental again. Please report bugs, either in the Debian BTS or in the upstream bugtracker. Latest addition to Merkaartor is a plugin to support the French Cadastre peoject.

Monitoring scientific atlanta cable modems with munin

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 22:57:23 +0200

Usually I like to monitor as much as possible. but unfortunately my cable provider does not allow to access the cable modem via SNMP, so I had to find a different way to retrieve at least some basic information. After a bit of googling I figured out how to access the web interface of the Scientific Atlanta modems. The model here is a EPC2203 - seems to work for various models, though. These modems do not only provide access to the traffic within the cable network on their internal networking port (ever tried tcpdump on that?), but they also have their own IP (192.168.100.1). To be able to access the modem you should add something like

post-up ip addr add 192.168.100.2/31 dev extern0 || true

to the configuration of the interface which is connected to the cable modem. Make sure you’re not using the same network internally - or find a proper way to handle it. If you access http://192.168.100.1/ then, you’ll be able to retrieve some basic information form the modem. If you google a bit longer, you might even be able to do more stuff!

But to monitor the power levels and signal-to-noise ratio, this is all we need. I’m using Munin usually, as the web interface is just much easier to setup than the collectd CGI (hint, hint!!). Drop the following two scripts into the Munin plugins folder. wget, sed and grep is all they need, so it should be easy to get them working.


#!/bin/sh

# Copyright (c) 2010 Bernd Zeimetz 
#
# Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any
# purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
# copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
#
# THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES
# WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
# MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR
# ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES
# WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN
# ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF
# OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE

PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
export PATH

if [ "$1" = "config" ]; then
        echo graph_title cable modem power level
        echo 'graph_args --base 1000'
        echo 'graph_vlabel dBmV'
        echo 'graph_category network'
        echo 'graph_info This graph shows receive and transmit power levels of the Scientific-Atlanta cable modem.'
        echo "receive.label receive"
        echo "receive.info Receive power level"
        echo 'receive.draw LINE2'
        echo 'receive.type GAUGE'
        echo "transmit.label transmit"
        echo "transmit.info Transmit power level"
        echo "transmit.draw LINE2"
        echo "transmit.type GAUGE"
        exit 0
fi

wget -q -O - http://192.168.100.1/system.asp | grep dBmV | \
    sed -e 's,.* ,,;s, dBmV.*,,' \
        -e '1s/^/receive.value /' \
        -e '2s/^/transmit.value /'


#!/bin/sh

# Copyright (c) 2010 Bernd Zeimetz 
#
# Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any
# purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
# copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.
#
# THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES
# WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
# MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR
# ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES
# WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN
# ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF
# OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.


PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
export PATH

if [ "$1" = "config" ]; then
        echo graph_title cable modem signal to noise ratio
        echo 'graph_args --base 1000'
        echo 'graph_vlabel dB'
        echo 'graph_category network'
        echo 'graph_info This graph shows the signal to noise ratio of the Scientific-Atlanta cable modem.'
        echo "signalnoise.label ratio"
        echo "signalnoise.info Signal to noise ratio"
        echo 'signalnoise.draw LINE2'
        echo 'signalnoise.type GAUGE'
        exit 0
fi
wget -q -O - http://192.168.100.1/system.asp |\
     grep 'Signal to Noise' | \
     sed 's,.* ,signalnoise.value ,;s, dB.*,,'

Guess you can easily figure out when I had issues with my cable connection.

Refactoring the guruplug server plus - part two

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 11:58:10 +0000

Although the modifications described in my last blog post about refactoring the GuruPlug resulted in a well working GuruPlug, I’ve decided to give it some more air to breath at the top of the case. The large round piece of plastic in the middle asked to be removed - and now a shiny 60mm fan grill protects the board from the bad world outside of the case.

So far its working fine and not too hot. Guess I’ll see what happens next summer.

Refactoring the guruplug server plus

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 22:24:12 +0000

As mentioned in my last blog post the GuruPlug Server Plus needs some major refactoring before it can be used. Not doing so will make you end up with a fried brick. There are various stories in the forums about cooling it properly, so you might want to have a look first instead of following mine blindly. And of course - whatever you do - it is your fault when you end up with a brick, not mine!.

Replacing the power supply

As I would never ever trust the PSU (see my last blog post for the gory details) and some additional free space in the case is necessary, it is time to rip it out. As replacement I’ve ordered an external 5V/20W PSU. To connect it to the plug I’ve drilled a hole into the case and added a proper connector after soldering the original cable from the old PSU to it. Make sure to add some retainer to stop the cable from touching the CPU/memory heat sinks later.

Proper heatsinks

One of the biggest problems in the original GuruPlug design is the heat spreading and collecting piece of alloy, which probably makes things even worse than better. After some discussion in #debian-devel the idea came up, that the board should be able to run fine without a heatsink - at least when idling. That is the case, indeed. So let’s get rid of that piece of alloy, together with the holders and springs.

Unfortunately heat things are necessary to handle some work load. To mount them make sure you get some good thermal glue as you don’t want to insulate the chips from their heat sinks. I’ve used Arctic Silver II thermal glue - not cheap, but working well. Make sure to clean the heat sinks and chips properly with alcohol (2-Propanol is my favourite for that), so there is no fat and dust left. When you use the glue be careful to read the documentation properly and make sure you apply only as much as necessary - a thin coating is enough. After applying the glue and mounting the heat sink you need a clamp to put some pressure on it while the glue dries.

Heat sinks for the memory

As there is a lot of space around the memory chips, I’ve got some 14x14x6mm heat sinks. Luckily there are only small parts on the other side of the board, so it was not hard to attach clamps to ensure the glue is able to dry properly. In case largish amounts of glue are squeezing out between heat sink and chip you probably want to start from scratch and clean everything (quickly!) with alcohol again.

Gigabit Ethernet PHY and CPU heatsinks

PHY and CPU need proper heatsinks as they’re becoming pretty hot under load. Due to space limitations I had to stick with a 17x17x20mm heat sink for the PHY. I’ve tried to get a largish heat sink with BGA mount for the CPU, but I was not able to find one in short time and without ordering 1000 of them. So I’ve got another one of the 17x17x20mm model for the CPU. Later I found two other heat sinks which might fit on the GuruPlug’s CPU: Malico 19x19x25mm or a Advanced Thermal Solutions Maxigrip. But for now the smaller one will have to do the job, also I’m scared to removed it without destroying the CPU.

To mount the heat sink on the PHY a bit of preparation is necessary to ensure that the glue doesn’t result in short cuts on the IC’s pins. The arctic silver documentation recommends to use silicone on the pins to stop the glue. As I neither had the proper silicone nor did I want to make such a mess, I’ve decided to get a sticky insulating tape and some tooth picks to mount it properly on the IC pins. Make sure to do a proper job here! With good clamps you can work on the PHY while the memory heat sink glue is still drying.

The other problem on this side of the board is that some higher parts are mounted on the lower side of the board, so make sure to get some foam to protect them from your clamps. Except of the size of the heat sinks there is no real difference to the small ones: add glue, mount the heat sink and fix it with a clamp.

Before the glue dries completely make sure you remove the duct tape strips again. Be careful not to wipe any excess glue onto the IC pins. If you manage to do so you might want to remove and clean everything properly. So just be careful and everything should be fine.

Mounting the heat sink on the CPU is easier as the CPU is a nice BGA package. No need to protect pins an there are none.

Finished

As you’re able to see on the photo I did not the very perfect job, but fine enough to work properly.

First tests with the new heatsinks

Some tests with stress and some heavy network traffic showed quickly that the heat sinks are working well! But not well enough to be able to mount them into the original closed case (how the hell was this supposed to work before!?). Without any air to breath the temperature on the CPU heat sink went up to 85 deg C quickly. So on the CPU’s die are > 100 deg C, which is at least close to the max allowed temperature.

Adding air holes

Obviously some additional air holes are necessary. After meeting my drill and cutter, the original case looks a bit like a piece of cheese now.

Some more tests show that the temperature sticks around 76 deg C under heavy load now. That is still pretty hot, especially when the temperature in the room becomes hotter in summer. As I’m not going to run a lot of traffic trough it (my cable connection is limited to 20 MBit/s anyway), I guess it will work. Below is a graph I’ve recorded with my multimeter and qtdmm. It shows that the temperature rises to ~76 deg C and stays there.

Not sure if I could introuce some more load, the CPU had a load of 6 running stress. Network traffic was around 2x100MBit/s again. I could imagine with 2xGBit the CPU and PHY would become much hotter (no idea if it would be able to handle it at all, though). The PHY was usually a bit cooler than the CPU, so I didn’t spend time to measure the temperature properly.

Conclusion

My opinion is still the the original design of the plug is an insane QA and design failure. There is no way that it could ever work as shipped originally. If I’d have to design a new case for it, it should have a single insulated compartment for a PSU to ensure that no contact with high voltage is possible. The case around all other parts should be made of alloy with a lot of air holes. So the case could be used as heat sink (properly done, not with these insulating duct tape strips) and at the same time allow air circulation and a nice view on the LEDs on the board. Of course the case would be much more expensive than, but I’m sure it would work properly and would be worth the money. And if done peoperly, it would look much better than this blinking plastic thing. I could imagine it would sell well!

So at the end I’m wondering what GlobalScale Technologies will do. I doubt it will be possible to create the ‘professional upgrade kit’ as they had announced before. Replacing all units is the only proper way. We’ll see what happens. At least my GuruPlug is working well now and it will be used as replacement for my OpenWRT router soon. WiFi is not working, but that will be handled by my media center anyway.

Update

I’ve done some more modifications - keep on reading here.

The guruplug server plus - major design and qa fail

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:25:24 +0000

As a lot of people are coming to my blog to read the installing instructions for Debian on the GuruPlug Server Plus, I shall not hide my opinion about it: It is a major design and QA fail. Don’t waste your money on it.

The power supply

Although I’ve ordered the Guruplug pretty early with the promise, that I’d have it in April, it arrived at the end of May due to QA issues with the power supply. While I appreciate that they didn’t deliver broken power supplies, I would have preferred not to receive one which was “fixed” by somebody who uses the soldering iron like an axe. Here are some macro photos to show the gory details:

Software issues

The version of UBoot which shipped with the device was only able to boot from NAND and network. Booting from USB failed and ext2 support was missing, too. Didn’t have a look if the community came up with a fixed UBoot version yet, but in my opinion a piece of hardware for >100 EUR should not have such flaws.

Thermal issues

Using the Guruplug with more than one 100 MBit/s connection is just not possible, as it would toast itself to death. For the details have a look at this discussion in the NewIT forum, it links to a lot of interesting photos and postings. This issue is a major design and QA failure. Even without knowing what the datasheets say, it is easy to imagine that a thin piece of alloy is not the proper way to cool a CPU and network chip. Especially not when it is mounted with cheapish pads instead of a proper paste.

As it seems the plan was to send the heat to the shielding of the network/USB/eSata ports (the area is marked red as my first plan was to remove that part of the alloy and reuse the heat-spreader), a strong indication for that is that this is the only area with holes for air circulation. I could imagine that it was not possible to have these holes next to the PSU, which was mounted above the heat-spreader, to avoid electrical shocks.

As there was no other opening for the heat to leave the case, even the microSD card became pretty hot - I’ve measured temperatures around 60 deg. C next to the card - while CPU and 100MB/s network were idling.

The official information from GlobalScale Technologies is that only 10/100MBit/s should be used as workaround to avoid overheating until a “Professional Upgrade Kit” is released. As mentioned here the upgrade kit announcement was removed silently from GST’s website. To be honest, this doesn’t make me wonder. There is no way to fix the Guruplug with an external fan or any other external magic as the only way to fix it is to cool the CPU and networking chip properly.

There are various workarounds for the cooling issues posted to the forums. I’ve decided to rip out the power supply and heat spreader out of the case and get a nice external PSU. The new connector is mounted, ready to supply the GuruPlug’s board with power.

Currently I’m waiting for the new heat sinks and glue to arrive. Then I’ll give it a try to mount eveything in the small case again, probably with some additional air holes. As soon as I have a workign solution, I’ll blog about it again.

Gimp-plugin-registry 3.5-1

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 22:41:34 +0200

During the last three months and since my last blog-post about gimp-plugin-registry a lot happened: Mainly a large number of new plugins was added, but also various enhancements and bugfixes went into the package, together with updates for various already included plugins.

For those who don’t know gimp-plugin-registry yet, it is a collection of scripts and plugins for The GIMP. The name is based on the webpage GIMP Plugin Registry, where most (new) plugins and scripts are listed. So far the package ships with 170 scripts/plugins. Most of the scripts are written in TinyScheme, but there are also several plugins in C or Python. Probably most noticeable is the inclusion of the GIMP FX Foundry, which is an awesome collection of 124 scripts.

Below follows a list of all scripts and plugins as shown in the long description of the Debian package. New plugins are marked with a bold fontface.

Add Film Grain (2.4): Helps adding realistic film grain to BW images.
btn4ws (0.8.0.1): Generates a series of buttons in three states (passive, active, pressed) with various selectable effects on them, as well as XHTML, CSS and JavaScript code for using the buttons.
Black and White Film Simulation (1.1): Converts the selected layer into Black and White using the channel mixer. Tries to produce results resembling tonal qualities of film.
CMYK Tiff 2 PDF for Gimp (20090321): This plugin completes the prepress workflow of using Separate+ to generate CMYK Tiff images by allowing you to convert the saved CMYK Tiff image into a PDF file.
Contact Sheet (2.02): Generates a contact sheet(s) for a directory of images.
David’s Batch Processor (1.1.9): A simple batch processing plugin for The Gimp - it allows the user to automatically perform operations (such as resize) on a collection of image files.
Diana-Holga2 (c): Diana/Holga Toys Cameras effect simulator.
El Samuko GIMP Scripts:
- Antique Photo Border Script: This script simulates a yellowed and slightly jagged border like these of old photographies.
- Che Guevara Script: This script generates a poster like the famous Che Guevara one from Jim Fitzpatrick.
- Cyanotype Script: This script simulates the Cyanotype printing process.
- Difference Layer Script This script generates two difference layers from the two layers on the top. It’s similar to GIMP’s built-in Grain Extract/Merge function, but the tonal range is bigger. Now you can apply further editing and “switch on/off” the adjustment by switching the visibility of the subtractive and the additive layer. Also you can change the modification intensity by changing the intensity of these two layers.
- Escape Line Script: This script creates escaping lines from any point. It’s similar in function to the built-in Line-Nova Script, but much more flexible. So you can chose the center, the thickness, the angle, the length, the offset and the randomness.
- Film Grain Script: This is yet another script which simulates the typical film grain of high ISO pictures.
- First Photo Border Script: This script simulates the cut-off of the first picture of a film roll of cheap cameras like Lomo.
- Lomo Script with Old Style Colors This script simulates the Lomo effect.
- Movie 300 Script: This script simulates the color style of the movie “300”.
- National Geographic Script: This script simulates a high quality (portrait) photo like these from the National Geographic.
- Obama “HOPE” Script: This script generates a poster like the famous Obama “HOPE” one from Shepard Fairey.
- Rainy Landscape Script: This script changes a dry landscape to a wet one.
- Photochrom Script: This script simulates a photochrom image, a lithographic printing process from the 1890’s.
- Sprocket Hole Script: This script simulates complete exposed 35mm film strips with frame numbers, lettering, overexposed sprocketholes and DX film edge barcodes.
- Sunny Landscape Script: This script changes a rainy landscape to a sunny one.
- Technicolor 2 Color Script: This script simulates the 2 Color Technicolor effect.
- Technicolor 3 Color Script: This script simulates the 3 Color Technicolor effect.
- Vintage Look Script: This script simulates a 70s vintage look.
EZ Perspective: Specialized tool for easily correcting or changing perspective.
Fix-CA (3.0.2): Corrects chromatic aberration in photos
Focus-Blur (3.2.5): This plugin tries to simulate an out-of-focus blur
GIMP FX Foundry (r111): Probably the largest script collection available for The GIMP.
GIMP-Mask: Do and undo several popular image masking (that is, censoring) methods (CP, FL, Q0, MEKO).
Warming and Cooling Filters (May 24, 2010): Warm or cool an image using one of several methods: Wratten, Roy’s Warm, Brauer’s Warm, Pasty Cadaveric Look
Layer-Effects (2.4): This is a series of scripts that implement various layer effects: Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Outer Glow, Inner Glow, Bevel and Emboss, Satin, Color Overlay, Gradient Overlay, Pattern Overlay, Stroke
Liquid Rescale (0.7.0): Content-aware rescaling. Keeps the features of the image while rescaling along a single direction.
Normalmap (1.2.2): Allows you to convert images into RGB normal maps for use in per-pixel lighting applications.
Planet Render (1-2): Creates a planet. Color, size and sun orientation can be set.
Refocus (0.9.1): The GIMP plugin to refocus images using FIR Wiener filtering. During image processing operations such as scanning and scaling, images tend to get blurry. The blurred impression of these images is due to the fact that image pixels are averaged with their neighbors. Blurred images don’t have sharp boundaries and look as though they have been taken with an unfocused camera.
Save for Web (0.29.0): Allows to experiment with various popular web format options. It shows an automatically updated preview and file size statistics.
Separate+ (0.5.6): Separate+ is a plug-in that generates color separations from an RGB image, proofs CMYK colors on the monitor and exports the CMYK TIFF file.
Smart Sharpen (redux) (2.4): This script implements the redux version of smart sharpening. It utilizes the Unsharp Mask or Refocus plugin to sharpen the image.
Streak-Camera simulation (0.6): A streak camera images an object through a slit - thus getting a “one dimensional image”. This image is propagated along the second dimension of the image plane at a constant speed. The result is a picture of the time dependency of the object.
Traditional Orton: This is an effect invented by Michael Orton in the 1990’s, which consists of taking two copies of an image, one blurred, and one sharp, and mixing them to produce an image with a dreamy quality. It is especially well suited to landscape and flower photography.
Wavelet Decompose (0.1.2): The wavelet decompose plugin decomposes a layer of an image into layers of wavelet scales. This means that you can edit the image on different detail scales (frequencies). The trivial recomposition of the image can be done by GIMP’s layer modes so you can see the results of your modifications instantly. Among the applications are retouching, noise reduction, and enhancing global contrast.
Wavelet Denoise (0.3.1): The wavelet denoise plugin is a tool to selectively reduce noise in individual channels of an image with optional RGB<->YCbCr conversion. It has a user interface to adjust the amount of denoising applied. The wavelet nature of the algorithm makes the processing quite fast.
X11 Mouse Cursor (XMC) plug-in (2.0.6): Enables GIMP to import and export X11 mouse cursor files.

If there is any interest from other distributions to include the package, I’d be happy to help out to make an integration as easy as possible. The few interesting parts could be ripped out of debian/rules and shipped as a normal Makefile, so they could be used easily. More complicated is the generation of the package description and copyright information, but I guess instead of writing debian/coyright and debian/control, it should be possible to integrate the information into a rpm spec file template or similar files. So in case you’re interested to port the package to Fedora, OpenSuSE or some other distribution, don’t hesitate to contact me! The sources are available via git, see git.recluse.de for details.

For wishes, suggestions and bug reports either use the Debian BTS or Launchpad. While I prefer bugs via the BTS, it might be easier for non-Debian users to file bugs in the Ubuntu Launchpad.

Creating a google sitemap for ikiwiki

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:23:49 +0200

ikiwiki is not yet able to create a Google sitemap internally, so I’m using google-sitemapgen. To run it automatically when the website is being updated, I’ve changed the git hook to run it after the ikiwiki hook.

In the ikiwiki setup file let git_wrapper point to a file which is not the post-update hook, so you’re able to run it from your own skript. I’m using /path/to/myikiwiki.git/hooks/post-update.ikiwiki.
Write a skript which runs as post-update hook and executes the created hook from ikiwiki and google-sitemapgen with a proper configuration. My versions of both files are listed below.

/path/to/myikiwiki.git/hooks/post-update [[!format sh """ #!/bin/sh

/path/to/myikiwiki.git/hooks/post-update.ikiwiki

/usr/bin/google-sitemapgen –config=/path/to/mywikiconfig/sitemap_config.xml

exec git-update-server-info “""]]

/path/to/mywikiconfig/sitemap_config.xml [[!format xml "”"

<site base_url=“http://bzed.de/" store_into="/path/to/bzed.de/sitemap.xml.gz” verbose=“0” suppress_search_engine_notify=“0” default_encoding=“UTF-8”

"""]]

See the examples and README files in /usr/share/doc/google-sitemapgen/ for an introduction into configuring google-sitemapgen.

So far the generated sitemaps works very well, especially for search engines which are not able to use the rss feeds like Google does.

Signs of bad package maintenance

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 02:13:52 +0200

<rant>Recently I’ve adopted a package, mainly as Merkaartor uses it now. It made me sad to see in which bad condition the package was. Here are just a few things I had to do to bring it into shape:

The former maintainer removed the documentation and added a +dfsg to the version as there were a few hints left that it is under GFDL or under no license at all. So I’ve mailed upstream and asked him to remove it and put the documentation under the same license as the rest of the project in an obvious way. Took a few hours and upstream responded and fixed the issue. Seems the former maintainer didn’t even bother to talk to upstream about it. And he didn’t bother to replace the removed manpages.
The Perl binding was never built. The Python extensions were only built for the default Python version instead for all supported versions. Putting gtk and non-gtk Python extensions into the same binary package also didn’t make much sense.
Symbol files for the libraries were not in the packaging.
Neither the copyright file was complete, nor the description, nor the necessary dependencies for some packages.

These points were only the larger issues, a lot more were fixed by me or by QA uploads while the package was orphaned. For me it seems that the former maintainer of that package threw some stuff together just to be able to upload the package - or at least run out of spare time to maintain a package properly several years ago.

To all the people who maintain packages - and it doesn’t matter if you maintain a single package or hundreds of them: Please orphan or at least RFA your packages if you don’t have the proper time to maintain (all of) them. Don’t open new ITPs if you obviously don’t have the time to maintain the packages you have already. Talk with your upstreams, they’re usually happy about it. Look at Lintian warnings and errors instead of overriding them. If you take patches from NMUs, say ‘thanks’ to the poor soul who had to create them for you in debian/changelog instead of taking the work without any notice.

Remember - Debian is a community effort, not a run for the highest number of maintained packages on your QA page.</rant>

Styling changes in ikiwiki 3.20100610

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 01:53:00 +0200

Some minutes before the release of 3.20100610 we convinced Joey in #ikiwiki to commit the following changes:

The part of the page which is usually parallel to the sidebar lives within a new div with the id “pagebody” now. This is the proper fix for the issue and workaround described here.
pre elements will show a scrollbar automatically now, thanks to overflow: auto; in the CSS.

We hope that nobody wants to hit us with a bat now :-)

Merkaartor 0.16.0 available in unstable

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 01:10:13 +0200

Merkaartor 0.16.0 was uploaded to Debian/unstable several days ago and should be available on all architectures now.

As usual please help testing the new version - upstream and me will try to fix all bugs as fast as possible. Below follows the long list of new features, for the full list of changes see the CHANGELOG.

Ramer-Douglas-Peucker simplification of ways (in Roads menu)
support for JOSM remote protocol on port 8111
support for “standard” (as in http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Tile_Map_Service_Specification) TMS
Preliminary support for OpenStreetBugs (Refs #983)
POC of a Gosmore map adapter
Allow to delete features from the context menu of the Features dock
Accept mlon/mlat URLs as emitted by mkgmap logging
Walking Papers backgound plugin + load WP scans as geotagged images
Import from OSC (osmChange format)
Feature-Force Delete action (deletes the feature without entry in the undo nor upload list)
Export to OSC (osmChange format)
CSV POI import
OSGB36 to the default list of projections
Add SHP feature attributes as not uploadable OSM Feature tags
Allow to save geotagged images
show geotagged photos on the map (disable via ‘view-Show Photos on map’)
Templates xsd (by Jonathan Bennett) (closes #2809; closes #2707)
allow to re-order relation members (closes #2759)
add a projection editor
allow google maps links in goto and download dialogs
Allow to tile (and cache) arbitrary WMS’es (only EPSG:4326 and google projection supported)
Export to OSC (osmChange format)
CSV POI import
OSGB36 to the default list of projections
Add SHP feature attributes as not uploadable OSM Feature tags
Allow to save geotagged images
show geotagged photos on the map (disable via ‘view-Show Photos on map’)
Templates xsd (by Jonathan Bennett) (closes #2809; closes #2707)
allow to re-order relation members (closes #2759)
add a projection editor
allow google maps links in goto and download dialogs
Allow to tile (and cache) arbitrary WMS’es (only EPSG:4326 and google projection supported)
support for WMS-C servers (see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Merkaartor/Documentation#WMS-C_Servers) (closes #2598)
add the possibility to show a lat/lon grid
Allow to zoom on the location of a GeoTIFF image
Brazilian Portuguese translation (by Marcio Moraes)

Installing Debian on the guruplug server plus

Sat, 29 May 2010 15:36:42 +0000

– Before buying or using a GuruPlug make sure you first read “the guruplug server plus - major design and qa fail” and “refactoring the guruplug server plus” –

Yesterday finally my GuruPlug Server Plus arrived. Took longer than expected, but as it seems Globalscale had some issues with the power supplies and they were replaced before shipping the GuruPlugs.

The GuruPlug

Basically the GuruPlugs are an enhanced version of the well known SheevaPlugs, the biggest difference is probably the need for an external JTAG/UART<>RS232 board to access the serial console. Good thing is that the board comes with a normal JTAG connector and an additional RS232 connector and 2.5V DC power outlet, so it will be useful for other devices, too. Globalscale could have chosen different connectors with less wiggly cables, though.

As I was not able to find a useful howto about installing Debian on the Guruplug, I’ve written down what I did to install Debian unstable on a micro SD card using the Debian installer for the GuruPlug. I did not have a look who modified the Debian installer to work on the plug, but thanks for that! The instructions below are based on Martin Michlmayer’s awesome SheevaPlug documentation, the hints from oinkzwurgl.org/guruplug and various forum posts in the plugforum.

Preparations

Please note that I’m not resposible for whatever you’re doing with your plug. If you follow this tutorial and end up with a brick, it is your fault, not mine.

To install the GuruPlug you need the JTAG Board. Connect the UART port to the GuruPlug and the JTAG board to your computer, it should show up as FTDI (thanks for using good chips!) USB<>Serial converter. Serial port settings are 115200, 8-N-1, no hw/sw flow control.

The other thing you should prepare is a working tftpd, I’m using aftpd.

apt-get install atftpd

Recent versions share files from /srv/tftp/, in case you’re running Lenny /var/lib/tftpboot/ should be the place to drop your files.

When everything is connected properly the boot process should show up in minicom, make sure to press some key to enter uBoot. The first thing you should do is to save the original uBoot environment in case you want to restore the factory settings later. Run

printenv

and save the output somewhere.

Upgrading uBoot

Unfortunately the uBoot version on the GuruPlug is pretty old and seems to have some issues in booting from USB devices, so the first thing you should do is to upgrade it. You might want to investigate if there is even a better, more recent uBoot version available somewhere, or build one on your own, but I didn’t bother and took the uBoot.guruplug.bin from here. The main issue with that is that booting from USB still seems to be buggy (even for FAT partitions) and that ext2load is still not supported. Otherwise it works well :-). I’m mainly following Martin Michlmayer’s tutorial again.

Download the uBoot.guruplug.bin and drop it into the tftpd directory. Make sure you always set the plug’s IP address (ipaddr) and your server’s IP address (serverip) properly. I’ll use 192.168.121.253 for the plug and 192.168.121.2 for the server in all examples, make sure to change that for your own needs. Stop if something goes wrong, especially when the tftp download failed.

setenv ipaddr 192.168.121.253
setenv serverip 192.168.121.2
tftp 0x6400000 uBoot.guruplug.bin
nand erase 0x00000000 0x0100000
nand write 0x6400000 0x0000000 0x80000
reset

Enter uBoot again after the reset.

Preparing the installer

Download uImage and uInitrd to your tftpd directory.

Although I’ve heard that setting mainlineLinux/arcNumber in the uBoot environment is not necessary anymore for very recent kernel, lets set them to make sure the Debian kernel works:

setenv mainlineLinux yes
setenv arcNumber 2097
saveenv
reset

Again, enter uBoot after the reset.

Running the installer

Run the following in the uBoot console:

setenv ipaddr 192.168.121.253
setenv serverip 192.168.121.2
tftpboot 0x01100000 uInitrd
tftpboot 0x00800000 uImage
setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200n8 base-installer/initramfs-tools/driver-policy=most
bootm 0x00800000 0x01100000

You should see the installer starting now. You might want to follow the following hints:

Before configuring the network, go back and set the debconf priority to low, Then continue. While chosing the Debian mirror, chose sid as the Debian version to install. If you don’t have sid as choice, use a different mirror. The kernel in testing does not boot on the GuruPlug, you need 2.6.32-13 from sid.
You might want to load the ‘network console’ installer component and continue via ssh. Makes things fater and colourful.
Suggested partitioning: I’ve installed Debian to an 8GB micro SDcard. The SDcard reader is connected via USB and shows up as /dev/sdb (/dev/sda should be the internal NAND and not shown by the installer). I’ve used 150MB ext2 for /boot and the rest of the space for /, using ext4. You might want to use the noatime option on both filesystems to avoid unnecessary write access to the SDcard. You might choose to add a swap partition, but SDcards are so slow, so I’ve skipped that.

When you continue the installation, you will hit the following problem:

The uBoot is not able to boot from your /boot anyway. USB support is buggy and ext2load missing.

We’ll work around this issue by writing the kernel and initrd into the plug’s NAND. To do so, enter a shell in the installer and chroot into the install target. We’ll then scp the necessary uImage and uInitrd to our tftpd directory:

chroot /target /bin/bash
cd /boot
scp uI* root@192.168.121.2:/srv/tftp

Now leave the shell, finish the installation and reboot, enter uBoot again.

Make the plug bootable

To write kernel and initrd to the NAND memory, we have to transfer it via tftp first, then erase the NAND area we want to write to and then write it to the NAND. The values I’ve chosen here should be fine for the current Debian kernel, but you might need to change the necessary size for the initrd. To do so have a look at the output while transferring the initrd - the transferred bytes are displayed. They have to fit into the amount of bytes you write (the last option to nand write.e).

setenv ipaddr 192.168.121.253
setenv serverip 192.168.121.2
tftp 0x6400000 uImage
nand erase 0x100000 0x400000
nand write.e 0x6400000 0x100000 0x400000
tftp 0x6400000 uInitrd
nand erase 0x500000 0x1fb00000
nand write.e 0x6400000 0x500000 0x600000

Now we need to set the necessary boot options. Make sure to change the root device if you’ve chosen a different layout from that I’ve suggested above, or if you’re not using a SDcard.

setenv bootargs_debian 'console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/sdb2'
setenv bootcmd_nand 'nand start; nand read.e 0x00800000 0x100000 0x400000; nand read.e 0x01100000 0x500000 0x600000'
setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(bootargs_debian); run bootcmd_nand; bootm 0x00800000 0x01100000'
saveenv
run bootcmd

Finish

Your GuruPlug should boot your new Debian installation now. Have fun! I’ll try to keep the howto updated for changes in uBoot and the installer, but I might not have the time to so quickly. Patches and comments are welcome!.

root@guruplug:~# uname -a
Linux guruplug 2.6.32-5-kirkwood #1 Fri May 21 05:44:29 UTC 2010 armv5tel GNU/Linux
root@guruplug:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo 
Processor	: Feroceon 88FR131 rev 1 (v5l)
BogoMIPS	: 1192.75
Features	: swp half thumb fastmult edsp 
CPU implementer	: 0x56
CPU architecture: 5TE
CPU variant	: 0x2
CPU part	: 0x131
CPU revision	: 1

Hardware	: Marvell GuruPlug Reference Board
Revision	: 0000
Serial		: 0000000000000000
root@guruplug:~#

Merkaartor - countdown to 0.16

Thu, 20 May 2010 22:44:09 +0200

As announced on the Merkaartor mailing lists, version 0.16 is planned to be released on 6th June. Therefore I’ve uploaded a git snapshot to experimental today. Please give it a try and report all problems, either to the Debian BTS or directly in the upstream bug tracker.

Version 0.16 will contain a lot of new features and various bugfixes and enhancements. For me the most important additions are support for Walking Papers and support for OpenStreetBugs. Also Merkaartor uses libgps now, so it is able to connect to recent versions of gpsd. With thanks to Chris Browet, the upstream author of Merkaartor, the next version of gpsd will ship with libQgpsmm, a C++/QT library to connect to gpsd. It should be possible to compile libQgpsmm under most platforms which are supported by QT4, including windows. Merkaartor will use libQgpsmm when available, so even Windows users will be able to use a remote gpsd instance.

Deb.li - the Debian ShortURL Service - status update

Wed, 19 May 2010 01:11:30 +0200

Although my progress in adding new features is not too fast (hint: patches and help is welcome), I’m quite happy with the progress of deb.li. As mentioned on my last post on debian-devel@l.d.o, I’ve spent some time to migrate it to the new, but very well written microframework Flask, which is based on Werkzeug, the probably most advanced WSGI utility module. The migration also allowed me to clean up several pieces of messy code which were necessary to work around some issues in python-bottle.

Also I’ve started to bring the layout and CSS into a nice shape. The templates are finished already, just a bit CSS is missing now.

Last but not least - the ciabot git script in the example clients is finished and used in a few git based projects on alioth.debian.org now. Just link /var/lib/gforge/chroot/home/users/bzed/godebian-client/ciabot.py to hooks/update and set your CIA project name by running git config hooks.cia-project your-project-name.

As usual - comments, bugreports and patches are welcome!

New css for bzed.de

Wed, 19 May 2010 01:11:30 +0200

After more than a year of using ikiwiki to run bzed.de I thought it would be a good time replace the darkish-brown style by something bright. Also I wanted to get righ of the massive changes I had to do on the template files to make the old layout work.

Unfortunately I hit one of the - in my opinion - major problems in the ikiwiki templates again: You can’t rely on all <div>s being available on all pages, which is quite annoying when you need them to style the page with CSS. So I had to make a tiny change to page.tmpl:

[[!format diff """ diff –git a/templates/page.tmpl b/templates/page.tmpl index 8a9911f..dbf78a0 100644 — a/templates/page.tmpl +++ b/templates/page.tmpl @@ -111,8 +111,8 @@ <TMPL_VAR CONTENT> <TMPL_IF HTML5><TMPL_ELSE></TMPL_IF>

-<TMPL_IF COMMENTS> <TMPL_IF HTML5>

<TMPL_ELSE>

</TMPL_IF> +<TMPL_IF COMMENTS> <TMPL_VAR COMMENTS> <TMPL_IF ADDCOMMENTURL>

@@ -121,8 +121,8 @@

Comments on this page are closed.

<TMPL_IF HTML5>

Gimp-plugin-registry package updated

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 21:05:47 +0200

Yesterday I finally found the time to update gimp-plugin-registry, the (hopefully!) largest and best collection of plugins for The GIMP. As usual here comes a short summary of the changes:

The wonderful scripts from El Samuko are included now:
Antique Photo Border Script
Che Guevara Script
Cyanotype Script
Difference Layer Script
Escape Line Script
Film Grain Script
First Photo Border Script
Lomo Script with Old Style Colors
Movie 300 Script
National Geographic Script
Obama “HOPE” Script
Rainy Landscape Script
Photochrom Script
Sprocket Hole Script
Sunny Landscape Script
Technicolor 2 Color Script
Technicolor 3 Color Script
Vintage Look Script
Included the X11 Mouce Curser (XMC) plugin as requested by KiBi.
Removed the GREYStoration plugin. This plugin was superseded by the gimp-gmic plugin, which is built from the gmic source. Most of the packaging work was done by Jakub Wilk (thanks!), it is waiting in NEW currently. Btw, gmic lives in the collab-maint git folder, don’t hesitate to help with the packaging work.
The following plugins were updated:
focus-blur
contactsheet
normalmap
save-for-web
seperate+

Hope you like my work, suggestions and bug reports are welcome as usual!

Deb.li - the Debian ShortURL Service - beta test

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:46:45 +0200

After several other Debian developers convinced me that a ShortURL service, which is under control of a Debian Developer would be useful for them, I’ve spent some time to write the necessary code for it. And if it will be used regulary, I’ll ask DSA if they want to host it on a proper machine.

So I’m happy to announce the public beta test of deb.li (also available under go.debian.net)! Please note that neither the content of the pages nor the CSS is finished… :)

As this should not become just another random, spammer-attracting ShortURL service, I will not provide a web based form to add new URLs. Instead new URLs have to be added via a simple JSON-RPC based interface. Other ways to add new URLs will be added on request (or by sending patches ;)), at least an email-gateway similar to db.debian.org is planned.

The small piece of documentation which exists so far is available at wiki.debian.org/deb.li And if you want to give it a try now, log into alioth.debian.org and have a look into

/var/lib/gforge/chroot/home/users/bzed/godebian-client

- the usage is documented in the README file and should be pretty straight forward.

I hope it will be useful - comments, bugreports and patches are welcome!

Assimilated

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:09:08 +0100

[[!img /_images/fedora_assimilated.jpg alt=“At the Chemnitzer Linux Tage the fedora project was assimilated by the Debian project as fedora realized that rpm is crap ;)” ]]

Merkaartor svn snapshot uploaded to experimental

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:01:28 +0100

As the release of version 0.15 of Merkaartor (a map editor for OpenStreetMap.org) is planned for the end of February, I’ve uploaded a svn snapshot based on revision 19956 to Debian experimental. Please test it and report bugs to the BTS as soon as possible, so I can triage and forward them to upstream.

Caching issues in django

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:41:13 +0100

Yesterday I stumbled upon an interesting and broken behaviour of Django: Running two instances with the same memcached as cache backend might result in displaying the wrong template from the cache in case we have template files with the same name but a different content.

This behaviour is also visible in all django applications which use the cache backend without taking care of settings.CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_KEY_PREFIX. As mentioned in the bug report a design decision is necessary here, as the setting was only supposed to be used in middlewares. On the other side not honouring the setting everywhere makes it impossible to use different (unrelated) Django instances with one memcached. While this is not such a big issue for template data, it should be - for example - possible to insert faked django CMS user permissions into memcached as they are cached there, too.

One possible solution is to ensure that settings.CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_KEY_PREFIX (or a similar setting with a better name) is used for every access. Using the following snippet as custom cache backend ensures this. Additionally it is much harder to insert faked cache content by using a md5 hexdigest as key. Although you should never store sensitive data in memcached - if you need to cache such data, use locmem, file or db as cache backend, as they allow to limit access to the data properly.

from django.conf import settings
from django.core.cache.backends.memcached import CacheClass as DjangoMemcachedCacheClass
from django.utils.hashcompat import md5_constructor

class CacheClass(DjangoMemcachedCacheClass):
    def __init__(self, server, params):
        self.key_prefix = settings.CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_KEY_PREFIX
        super(CacheClass, self).__init__(server, params)

    def _genkey(self, origkey):
        return md5_constructor("%s:%s" %(self.key_prefix, origkey)).hexdigest()

    def add(self, key, value, timeout=0):
        return super(CacheClass, self).add(self._genkey(key), value, timeout)

    def get(self, key, default=None):
        return super(CacheClass, self).get(self._genkey(key), default)

    def set(self, key, value, timeout=0):
        return super(CacheClass, self).set(self._genkey(key), value, timeout)

    def delete(self, key):
        return super(CacheClass, self).delete(self._genkey(key))

    def get_many(self, keys):
        return super(CacheClass, self).get_many(self._genkey(key))

    def incr(self, key, delta=1):
        return super(CacheClass, self).incr(self._genkey(key), delta)

    def decr(self, key, delta=1):
        return super(CacheClass, self).decr(self._genkey(key), delta)

The ganneff way of becoming a Debian package maintainer

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:46:43 +0100

Once there was a project called Debian and a Ganneff…. (unfortunately in German only….)


22:20 < cb> Das ist doch voll die Arbeit Maintainer zu werden :-). Ich geb
gewünschte Pakete immer nur weiter an einen der da sowieso schon den Kernel
betreut :-)
22:21 < Ganneff> es is nur viel arbeit wenn du keinen schimmer hast
22:22 < cb> ja ich hab nur das seepferdchen *g*
22:22 < Obilan> Knusper: ja sicher ist es das
22:22 < Knusper> kopf -> tisch
22:22 < cb> Knusper, wenn du die verwaisten pakete findest siehst du auf
der gleichen seite auch die links wie man maintainer wird
22:22 < Knusper> die hab ich gefunden
22:22 < cb> zumindest hab ich das das letzte mal dort gesehen
22:24 < Ganneff> wnpp?
22:24 < Knusper> aber man brauch dann schon leute, die einen "hoffieren"
22:26 < Ganneff> du brauchst erstmal die ahnung nen paket zu bauen.
22:26 < Ganneff> dazu siehe new maint guide
22:26 < Ganneff> dann brauchste nen sponsor. dazu gehe zur mentors liste
22:26 < Ganneff> dann machste mit dem eh weng rum (also normal so
paketuploads via dem)
22:26 < Ganneff> und hast da halt schon dein maintenance krams.
22:27 < Ganneff> irgendwann is der sponsor angekotzt von dir und dem
laufenden arbeit generieren
22:27 < Ganneff> der tritt dich dann dass du mal DM anfängst.
22:27 < Ganneff> das machste dann, und jemand anders tritt dir deine pakete
als dmua zurecht, nachdem du in nem keyring irgendwo steckst.
22:27 < Ganneff> und dann kannste denn krampf selbst hochladen. aber nix
andres.
22:27 < Ganneff> irgendwann willste was andres. und willst das auch noch
ohne son doofen sponsor
22:28 < Ganneff> dann versuchste dich an DD
22:28 < Knusper> ahhhhhh
22:28 < Ganneff> dazu musste dir nen advocate suchen
22:28 < Ganneff> der is üblicherweise einer dem du vorher im prozess
laufend auf den wecker fielst
22:28 < Ganneff> und er deswegen den nm leutz sagt "oh gott, befreit mich
bloss von dem"
22:28 < Ganneff> die machen das dann, aber sie wollen dir mal etwas
schmerzen zurückgeben
22:28 < Ganneff> desdewegen wirste viele fragen beantworten müssen
22:29 < Ganneff> und wie beim tüv das auto musste hier deine pakete nochmal
vorstellen und checken lassen
22:29 < Ganneff> und dann nochmal fragen beantworten
22:29 < Knusper> thx...
22:29 < Ganneff> irgendwann gehst du dann mit den antworten den nm leuten
so auf den geist dass die dem frontdesk sagen "meine kacke, den wolle mehr
nit mehr sehen, schickts den dochma zu den DAMs, die hamms verdient"
22:30 < Ganneff> und die machen das dann meist. ausser sie mögen dich nich.
dann darfste nochma fragen beantworten
22:30 < Ganneff> bei den dams darfste nur warten. die testen deine geduld
22:30 < Ganneff> irgendwann langweilen die sich aber
22:30 < Ganneff> und dann kriegste plötzlich mail
22:30 < Ganneff> OH MEIN GOTT. EIN NEUER DD.
22:30 < Ganneff> ende
22:30 < Ganneff> kapitel 2:
22:30 < cb> schöne beschreibung
22:30 < Ganneff> du machst ne zeit als dd rum
22:30 < Knusper> LOL
22:30 < Ganneff> votest durch die gegend
22:30 < Ganneff> lädst pakete umher
22:30 < Ganneff> machst bugs in stable
22:30 < Ganneff> gibts dem security team arbeit
22:31 < Ganneff> sprich - du gehst allen auf den sack. denn das is was ein
dd macht. muss ja schliesslich auch spass machen.
22:31 < Ganneff> aber irgendwann, also irgendwann, da wird das langweilig
22:31 < Ganneff> und dann verschwindeste mal ne zeit.
22:31 < Ganneff> weil du weisst - da gibts noch son team. das brauch auch
arbeit
22:31 < Ganneff> die suchen so leute die weggehen und sich verstecken
22:31 < Ganneff> nennt sich mia. die suchen.
22:31 < Ganneff> vielleicht finden die dich ja auch.
22:32 < Ganneff> dann kommste zurück und machst mal wieder etwas arbeit für
security/stable/sonstwen
22:32 < Ganneff> oder nicht, aber das is langweilig, da fliegste einfach.
22:32 < Ganneff> wennde dann gar keinen bock mehr hast und ne längre pause
willst
22:32 < Ganneff> dann gehste und machst eien auf emeritus
22:32 < Ganneff> das sind die rentner, die alten säcke, die sich
zurücklehnen und über die versuche der neuen lachen die sich grad von den
sponsoren quälen lassen
22:33 < Ganneff> ende kap. 2, ich hab keinen bock mehr. (jaja, emeritus)

Cheers to #debian.de on freenode :-)

Douf00 - fat free presentations

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:39:21 +0200

Now there is yet another package with a weird name in Debian - douf00 - a lightweight, slim and straight forward presentation tool. Written by some guys from a hacking and security team, which is mainly based in Vienna - guess that explains the l33t name (if you’re scared now, yes, I’ve reviewed the code…). At the FrOSCon one of the authors asked me if I’d be willing to package it for Debian.I’m sure you’ll love it if you’re giving presentations and don’t like to mess with Openoffice.org and friends. Below I’ve cited some parts of the README - make sure you read the linked file if you want to know more, or just install the package and give it a try.

Douf00 is a lightweight, slim and straight forward Presentation Tool. It assists novice as well as experienced speakers when giving lectures and business meetings. With its simple presenters Screen that includes current slide - next slide (preview) as well as timers it is designed to assist those of us, that are willing to step up their lectures to the next level. The main reason why we created douf00 is because we (nice name crew) travel to conferences very often. As a matter of fact i always carried my macbook pro to every event. I always loved keynote and how the presenters screen works. Not having to worry about your beamer configuration and presenters screen is really comforting. However since i love to pack small and play big (on it stuff) i really felt we had to do something about it. Given the current situation presenters using linux have to deal with, we decided to simplify it. Of corse as a geek i would love to travel just with my netback saving valuable space in my backpack. In reality i was always caring my heavy macbook pro 15" everywhere just to lecture. Not only is it bad to give a presentation standing behind your machine because your presenters remote doesn't work. It is also highly annoying to always have to fumble around with your graphics card. Given the large verity of tools for creating your slides. (i.e.: powerpoint, open office impress, apple's keynote, latech-beamer,....) We felt there was no room for yet another slide creation tool. Nonetheless i noticed my desire to jump onstage, give a really good presentation without the usual worries. To be honest i use Keynote from apple on my home computer as i find it the most comforting tool to create slides. But now that we have created doufoo i save up on baggage space, and i finally managed to get rid of all the worries beforehand. But what is doufoo? - The perfect choice for every presenter that has more important stuff todo than care about beamer configuration more than once. Its fast, simple and lightweight. We think that caring less about your gear and focusing on the presentation itself is the best way to keep your audience enthusiastic and entertained.

German keyboard layout for cyanogenmod

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:33:16 +0200

After installing the really awesome CyanogenMod on my G1/HTC Dream I was facing the problem that the keyboard layout was switched to qwerty - while I really prefer that on all my computers, it is annoying to use if you have to guess all the Alt keys.

There are several opinions out there about what to do to change the keyboard layout - the following procedure works well for me:

First download the android sdk if you haven’t done so yet, you’ll need adb from the tools directory. Connect your phone via USB and run

adb devices

to check if adb is able to detect the phone. If not, you probably need to setup the device permissions correctly. If adb is able to detect your devices, use it to remount /system read-write and enter a shell:

adb remount
adb shell

Paste the following into the adb shell - please note that the phone will reboot. If you don’t want that, don’t paste the reboot line.

cp /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad-qwertz.kcm.bin /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad-v3.kcm.bin
cp /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad-qwertz.kcm.bin /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad-v2.kcm.bin
cp /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad-qwertz.kcm.bin /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad.kcm.bin
cp /system/usr/keylayout/trout-keypad-qwertz.kl /system/usr/keylayout/trout-keypad-v3.kl
cp /system/usr/keylayout/trout-keypad-qwertz.kl /system/usr/keylayout/trout-keypad-v2.kl
cp /system/usr/keylayout/trout-keypad-qwertz.kl /system/usr/keylayout/trout-keypad.kl
reboot

Now your keyboard layout should be qwertz again.

Retrieving debconf translations from the bts

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:17:16 +0200

Downloading debconf translations from the bts and committing them to my packaging repository was always a task which pretty much annoyed me. Today I spent some time on writing a script which does this job for me. There is still much to improve - it is more like a prove of concept - but it works for me. With some love and probably a rewrite in Perl or Python it is a good candidate for devscripts probably.


#!/bin/bash

set -e
[ -d debian/po ] || exit 255
[ -r debian/control ] || exit 255

function get_ci_message() {
	echo "Updating debconf translation: ${2}"
	echo ""
	echo "Thanks: $(echo ${3} | sed 's, <[^<]*@[^>]*>.*,,')"
	echo "Closes: #${1}"
}

pkg_source=$(grep '^Source:' debian/control| awk '{print$2}')
for bug in $(bts select source:${pkg_source} tag:l10n tag:patch status:open); do
	#sanety check - stop if there is somethign left to commit.
	git status | grep -qE '^nothing.*to commit' || exit 255

	#cache bug files
	bts cache ${bug}

	# po files are gzip or bz2 compressed sometimes
	find ~/.devscripts_cache/bts/${bug} -type f -name '*.po.gz' -exec gunzip {} \;
	find ~/.devscripts_cache/bts/${bug} -type f -name '*.po.bz2' -exec bunzip2 {} \;

	#find the last .po file from the attachments
	pofile=$(find ~/.devscripts_cache/bts/${bug} -type f -name '*.po' |\
			sort | tail -1)
	if [ -z ${pofile} ]; then
		echo "Ignoring bug #${bug} - no po file found"
		continue
	fi

	# find the basename of the .po file, some translators use
	# packagename.xy.po, we try to work around that
	basename=$(basename ${pofile} | sed 's,.*\.\([a-z][a-z].po\),\1,')

	# sanety check if we have a filename like xy.po now
	if ! echo ${basename} | grep -qE '^[a-z][a-z].po$'; then
		echo "Ignoring bug #${bug} - ${basename} not a useful name"
		continue
	fi

	cp ${pofile} debian/po/${basename}

	#git add and commit it.
	git add debian/po/${basename}

	author=$(bts status ${bug} |\
		grep '^originator' |\
		awk -F '\t' '{print $2}')

	get_ci_message ${bug} ${basename} ${author} | git commit -F - --author="${author}"
	bts cleancache ${bug}
done

The git commit messages are prepared for usage with git-dch, which is my favourite way to write the Debian changelog.

Update: The script is using the originator information from the bug as author information for the commit now. Thanks to Santi for the comment! I could not test the changes yet, but I assume it will work well :)

Pidgin-blinklight replacement for other messengers

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:39:22 +0200

One of my favourite plugins for pidgin is pidgin-blinklight, which blinks my ThinkPad’s ThinkLight upon the arrival of new messages. Pretty useful as it is not as annoying (especially for others around you) as playing weird sounds. Unfortunately such a plugin is not available for other messengers like psi - but you’re able to specify your own sound player. So I came up with the following script, which is my default sound player in psi now.

#!/bin/bash

IBMLIGHT="/proc/acpi/ibm/light"

function light_is_on() {
	[ "on" = "`grep status ${IBMLIGHT} | awk '{print $2}'`" ]
	return $?
}

function light_off() {
	echo off > ${IBMLIGHT}
}

function light_on() {
	echo on > ${IBMLIGHT}
}

if light_is_on; then
	light_off
	sleep 0.2
	light_on
	sleep 0.1
	light_off
	sleep 0.2
	light_on
else
	light_on
	sleep 0.2
	light_off
fi

Hint: In case you want a blinking light and sound, just add something like exec /usr/bin/play $@ at the end of the script.

Gpsd 2.39-3 in Debian experimental

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:56:07 +0200

Since a few days a new revision of gpsd is available in Debian/experimental. If you’re a gpsd user, please give it a try as it contains various changes to the debconf templates and the config script. Although I don’t expect any problems, it is better to test it well. Also there’re several updates of the template translations missing and I want to give the translators some more time before uploading the package to unstable.

The other important change in the package was to add a gpsd-dbg package which contains all debug symbols and python-dbg builds of the extensions. Hopefully it will help to debug all gpsd related issues, although until now I did not have a single bug report where they would have been necessary.

Finally my thanks go to Christian Perrier and Justin B Rye for reviewing and fixing all the descriptions and templates.

Looking for a grip replacement

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:50:10 +0200

Today was the first day I needed a tool to rip an audio CD after the removal of grip from testing/unstable. Unfortunately I did not find an appropriate replacement yet. At the moment I’m using asunder, which is nice, but missing a lot of the features grip had.

Dear lazyweb, is there a proper replacement for grip out there, or is anybody willing to take over the upstream maintenance for grip?

Vmbuilder for Debian

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:25:09 +0200

As we needed it for one of our customers, I’ve started to add support for Debian to the Ubuntu VMBuilder. My changes are not merged into trunk yet, but you can get them by running bzr branch lp:~bzed/vmbuilder/debian. At the moment there is only support for Etch, I’ll add Lenny and Squeeze as soon as I find the time for it, probably next week - patches are welcome.

Howto set android developer device permissions with udev

Sun, 24 May 2009 22:33:47 +0200

As there’re several, more or less well working howtos about creating udev rules to allow access to the USB debug devices of Android phones out there in the wild, I decided to write my own one. The udev rules file I provide here works at least for the HTC Dream models (aka T-Mobile G1 and Google Devphone) and the ZTE Blade (aka Orange San Francisco), probably for other phones, too.

As a computer may be used by more than one user, I’ve decided to create a group called androiddev. Members of the group will be allowed to access the debug interface. Running (hint: become root first)

addgroup –system androiddev

will create the group for you. Add your developers to the group with

adduser username androiddev

(of course replace username with the user you’d like to add) and we’re ready to configure udev. Open /etc/udev/rules.d/android.rules in an editor and add the following lines:

# HTC G1. Maybe other models, too
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0c01", MODE="0660", OWNER="root", GROUP="androiddev", SYMLINK+="android%n"
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0c02", MODE="0660", OWNER="root", GROUP="androiddev", SYMLINK+="android%n"
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0fff", MODE="0660", OWNER="root", GROUP="androiddev", SYMLINK+="android%n"

# ZTE Blade
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="19d2", ATTRS{idProduct}=="1354", MODE="0660", OWNER="root", GROUP="androiddev", SYMLINK+="android%n"
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="18d1", ATTRS{idProduct}=="d00d", MODE="0660", OWNER="root", GROUP="androiddev", SYMLINK+="android%n"

That’s it. Udev will reload and activate the new ruleset. Don’t forget to re-login to make sure your new shiny group will show up! Now have fun with adb and fastboot :) Thanks to TauPan from #debian/freenode.net who gave me the idea for this blog post.

Second Update: Added the proper line for fastboot and cleaned up the howto.

Third Update: Adding lines for ZTE Blade (aka Orange San Francisco).

Package build time: cdbs vs dh

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:43:04 +0200

Most people (at least those who hear me shouting on irc) probably know that I’m not a fan of cdbs. While working on geoclue, which builds a lot of binary packages I realized, that cdbs wastes an insane amount of time by calling dh_* for every single package. One of the reasons geoclue uses cdbs is that the maintainer likes the short debian/rules file. We’ll, compare yourself:

cdbs:

#!/usr/bin/make -f
# -*- makefile -*-

# Uncomment this to turn on verbose mode.
#export DH_VERBOSE=1

include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/patchsys-quilt.mk
include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/debhelper.mk
include /usr/share/cdbs/1/class/autotools.mk
include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/utils.mk

common-binary-predeb-arch:: list-missing

clean::
	rm -f providers/gypsy/Makefile
	rm -rf debian/tmp

Build time: dpkg-buildpackage -B 132.20s user 41.52s system 90% cpu 3:11.13 total

dh(1):

#!/usr/bin/make -f
# -*- makefile -*-

include /usr/share/quilt/quilt.make

build: $(QUILT_STAMPFN) build-stamp
build-stamp:
	dh build
	touch $@

%:
	dh $@

clean: clean-patched unpatch
clean-patched:
	dh clean
	rm -f providers/gypsy/Makefile
	rm -f build-stamp

.PHONY: patch unpatch clean clean-patched build

Build time: dpkg-buildpackage -B 85.63s user 32.91s system 91% cpu 2:08.91 total

So cdbs wasted about one minute of time using a 2.4 GHz Intel Core2Duo. I’m wondering how much more time it takes on slow architectures like mips(el) and arm(el). One more argument against the unmaintaible mess of makefiles called cdbs.

Gimp-plugin-registry updated

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:57:40 +0200

Somehow I managed to forget to blog about this for some time - version 2.1-1 of gimp-plugin-registry is available in testing since several days. For detailed changes please have a look in the changelog, for the impatient - here is the summary:

New plugins: btn4ws, sprocket-hole, cmyk-tiff-2-pdf, dustcleaner (back again, was removed for stable as it was not mature enough)
New upstream versions of the following plugins: lqr, DBP, diana-holga2, focusblur, GREYCstoration, LayerEffects (now using Python), normalmap, save-for-web, seperate+, wavelet-denoise
Removed plugins: exposure-blend

As usual let me know if there’s a nice plugin you’d like to see in the package.

Gimp-plugin-registry update planned

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:30:24 +0100

Within the next days I plan to update the gimp-plugin-registry package, including the latest versions of all plugins. So if you’d like to see a new fance plugin in the package, or you have any other wish, please add a comment here, or even better, file a wishlist bug report against the package. Patches are welcome, git repository informations are listed below.

gitweb
git://git.recluse.de/debian/pkg-gimp-plugin-registry.git
http://git.recluse.de/repos/debian/pkg-gimp-plugin-registry.git

Extra points if you find new/forked versions of plugins which are/were listed on registry.gimp.org but disappeared or are not updated anymore. Since the page moved to a blog-like style, and old plugin entries are not updated as before, it became harder for me keep the plugins uptodate. Help is appreciated.

Why you should use gpsd over gypsy

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 01:48:05 +0100

While working on the Debian packages of navit I stumbled upon gypsy, as the libgypsy is used by navit to listen to notifications about location changes via D-Bus.

As maintainer of the gpsd package I started to wonder what the opinion of the gpsd developers about gypsy is - especially after reading that “Gypsy was designed to fix the numerous design flaws found in GPSD”. Well, here is their answer, which I support fully.

I’m blogging about it as I think it is important to know about this details if you plan to do something useful with a gps device, for example on mobile phones like the OpenMoko Freerunner. gpsd works very well on embedded devices, and if there’s a feature missing just contact the developers. They’re very responsive and like to implement useful features, if they can get a spec to do so (and even better, the hardware to test it). So I’m really wondering if it wouldn’t make sense to replace the minimal NMEA/UBX implementation in the FSO Framework Daemon by gpsd, even if that means to compile code instead of writing Python code, which is much faster for rapid prototyping, of course.

Awesome calendar widget

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 01:18:25 +0100

One of the things I was missing in my favourite windowmanager awesome was a calendar widget. So I spent some minutes and coded it. Moving the mouse over the time widget will show a naughty popup with the current month, use your mouse buttons (and the shift key) to scroll trough the months. The only annoying thing was to figure out how to change the text of an existing notification: notification.box.widgets[2].text = "new test" is neither easy to figure out nor to use.

But here’s the code for your rc.lua - in case you want to have a license for it - the code is published as public domain or under the ISC license, what ever you prefer.

Update: With thanks to a hint from madduck, the naughty popup is now aware of the screen your mouse is pointing to.

function displayMonth(month,year,weekStart)
    local t,wkSt=os.time{year=year, month=month+1, day=0},weekStart or 1
    local d=os.date("*t",t)
    local mthDays,stDay=d.day,(d.wday-d.day-wkSt+1)%7

    local lines = {}

    for x=0,6 do
        lines[x+1] = os.date("%a ",os.time{year=2006,month=1,day=x+wkSt})
    end
    lines[8] = "    "

    local writeLine = 1
    while writeLine < (stDay + 1) do
        lines[writeLine] = lines[writeLine] .. "   "
        writeLine = writeLine + 1
    end
        
    for x=1,mthDays do
        if writeLine == 8 then
            writeLine = 1
        end
        if writeLine == 1 or x == 1 then
            lines[8] = lines[8] .. os.date(" %V",os.time{year=year,month=month,day=x})
        end
        if (#(tostring(x)) == 1) then
            x = " " .. x
        end
        lines[writeLine] = lines[writeLine] .. " " .. x
        writeLine = writeLine + 1
    end
    local header = os.date("%B %Y\n",os.time{year=year,month=month,day=1})
    header = string.rep(" ", math.floor((#(lines[1]) - #header) / 2 )) .. header

    return header .. table.concat(lines, '\n')
end

local calendar = {}
function switchNaughtyMonth(switchMonths)
    if (#calendar < 3) then return end
    local swMonths = switchMonths or 1
    calendar[1] = calendar[1] + swMonths
    calendar[3].box.widgets[2].text = displayMonth(calendar[1], calendar[2], 2)
end

mytextbox.mouse_enter = function ()
    local month, year = os.date('%m'), os.date('%Y')
    calendar = { month, year, 
                naughty.notify({
                    text = displayMonth(month, year, 2),
                    timeout = 0, hover_timeout = 0.5,
                    width = 200, screen = mouse.screen
                })
               }
end 
mytextbox.mouse_leave = function () naughty.destroy(calendar[3]) end

mytextbox:buttons({
    button({ }, 1, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(-1)
    end),
    button({ }, 3, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(1)
    end),
    button({ }, 4, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(-1)
    end),
    button({ }, 5, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(1)
    end),
    button({ 'Shift' }, 1, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(-12)
    end),
    button({ 'Shift' }, 3, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(12)
    end),
    button({ 'Shift' }, 4, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(-12)
    end),
    button({ 'Shift' }, 5, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(12)
    end)
})

Migrating to ikiwiki

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 03:31:57 +0100

Hi Planet Debian!

After being away from the planet for more than a year now, I’m finally back :) My plan to migrate to ikiwiki got postponed a lot of times as I had more important things to do. The migration of the content of my old wiki is still not complete, but I hope to finish that soon. Why I’ve migrated away from Dokuwiki? Mainly because I really prefer to have a git backend and being able to add content with vim. The other reason is that php sucks. Dokuwiki really rocks otherwise, and I’ll keep recommending it to the not-so-geekish people.

Be prepared to see more posts from me soon :) In the meantime it would be great if you’d tell me if therere CSS problems somewhere, I’ve tested it with Iceweasel only. Thanks in advance!

Curriculum Vitae - Bernd Zeimetz

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

My curriculum vitae is available as PDF download in German and English.

Imprint

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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bernd@bzed.de
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pub   rsa4096/EB36171A6FF9435F 2009-05-11 [SC] [expires: 2022-01-30]
      Key fingerprint = ECA1 E3F2 8E11 2432 D485  DD95 EB36 171A 6FF9 435F
uid                 [ultimate] Bernd Zeimetz <bernd@bzed.de>
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uid                 [ultimate] [jpeg image of size 3107]
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sub   rsa4096/0697AB1BC8A80631 2014-04-24 [E] [expires: 2022-01-30]