Archive of posts from 2008
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FOSDEM 2009
Are you?
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My Debian packages in Git
I finally got sufficiently fed up with Subversion yesterday to begin converting my package repositories to Git. This has many benefits, including the fact that I can now easily publish them. Browse or clone them as you prefer. Or just ignore them.
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For those who care about firmware
Some drivers in Linux include "firmware" - code that runs on the device the driver deals with, not the main processors in the system. Most of this is in a binary or equivalent form, which is probably not the form that it was originally written in. This makes it non-free by Debian's standards, an issue which has led to much argument around previous releases and has blown up once again.
The good news is that kernel developers are making a continuing effort to separate this from the driver code. I've collected together the patches that do this and written 2 of my own, which appear to cover all the remaining sourceless firmware. But I was only able to test one of these drivers (radeon) - the rest is up to you.
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chmod -x considered harmful
I discovered an interesting "feature" of chmod(1), which caused a package build to fail. According to the GNU manual page, if no letters are used before a "-" or "+", "the effect is as if a were given, but bits that are set in the umask are not affected." The command will also fail with an error message when it does this!
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DebConf videos on Planet Debian
In addition to live streams, recordings of each event should be published on meetings-archive.debian.net. There is an RSS feed of these, which should work nicely in Miro: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2008/debconf8/index.rss. That feed is also included on Planet Debian. This is the first time I've tried generating RSS so apologies in advance if I make a mess of the Planet.
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Last of the DebConf 7 videos, no, really
Sorry, I missed a few last time.
Dependency-based boot sequence low high Data-mining Popcon low high Debian-installer - an update low high Wacky ideas II low high -
Last of the DebConf 7 videos
A few of the recordings from DebConf 7 had to be recovered in whole or in part from tape. For personal and technical reasons, a few of these were not done last year, and I have finally dealt with them now. The last few sessions are:
The secure Debian Desktop low high Debian - The Universal Operating System? low high Wacky ideas BoF low high lintian BoF low high Debian travels around the world low high Leading a Free Software project low high Method diffusion in large volunteer projects low high Debtags is ready low high OpenStreetMap low high Maintaining packages with Git low high netconf low high Time for a better init system low high Hopefully these are useful to someone. Sorry it took so long!
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Becoming a kernel developer
After a fair amount of clean-up, a lot of waiting for review, and some ruthless pruning, I and my colleagues at Solarflare finally got our net driver accepted for Linux 2.6.26. Meanwhile a larger version of the driver made it into Xen's Linux tree, along with dependent drivers to provide a secure fast path to the hardware from domU. Somewhere down the road we're going to have to resolve these two versions, but now I'm just pleased to have a working driver in-tree.
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My day job
I'm employed at Solarflare Communications in the test group, supporting the work of testers and developers by developing test frameworks. (We actually have very few pure testers and a whole lot of automation.). In a major break from my previous jobs, I've been working mostly in Python on applications for use in-house.
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Debian Miniconf 7 recordings
Most of the Debian Miniconf 7 sessions at LCA 2008 in Melbourne were recorded by the LCA video team. The recordings are now mirrored on meetings-archive.debian.net. -
Idea for a new PAM module
To guard against late-night administrative mistakes: pam_breathalyser. -
Separated at birth
L: Bill Gates; R: Matthew Garrett
