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Using autofs for GPG keys on a USB stick

A few people have asked me how I use GPG with a USB stick. I've written up a small howto for them, but it's probably worth sharing with a wider audience.

21:17 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 0 comments

Debian T-shirts popping up everywhere...!

Phil and I managed to catch up with Linus when he was at the kernel summit in Cambridge last month. We gave him a Debian T-shirt at the time, as Phil blogged at the time.

Barton George was one of a number of Sun people who came along to Debconf, and he picked up an Etch T-shirt while he was there too. Apparently he's quite keen to wear it in public too... :-)

Any more action shots out there?

22:21 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 1 comment

*yawn*

It seems that MJ Ray can't help but wantonly misinterpret other people's words. He posted about my question to debian-project (which is fair enough), but in his own inimitable style blatantly missed the point, presumably to cause offence. I'm not suggesting banning non-Debian posts from Planet Debian at all; what I'm suggesting is removing feeds that have zero content relevant to Debian, and I started a discussion to ask for other people's opinions. Spot the difference?

Mark, this kind of snide, troll-like posting is exactly the reason why people "inexplicably dislike" you. If you can't understand that, well...

14:17 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 0 comments

Why do you work on Debian?

That's a question I've been asked (by myself and others) lots of times over the years I've been involved. Especially over the last few months while I've been wandering around Europe on the BSP and party trail, I've also been asking other people to explain their motivations too. For myself, I must admit that I'm selfish:

• I want to have a good free operating system for me to use, and Debian certainly fits that need.
• I'm a bit of a control freak - to make sure that the OS matches what I need, I want to be able to contribute and help direct how things are done. Again, Debian fits that for me.
• I want to be able to trust the OS and the people working on it. Debian certainly meets that - I've met large numbers of DDs now, and almost without fail they're competent, friendly people who are good to work with and (probably just as importantly to me) good to meet up with and socialise with.
• I like stability too. There's a very large selection of software available for me to use, yet I can just install stable on my servers without having to worry personally about the security of all the random packages I may install. I can also rely on new stable releases coming along from time to time, with good support for upgrades and plenty of support for older releases so I can safely upgrade without surprises.

Obviously, there's also the fun of hacking on a variety of Free software programs. But that's something I could do on my own, or within a multitude of projects out there. But in very few of those would I be able to materially affect how I use my own computers every day.

So, my question for the other Debian people: what gets you working on Debian?

22:25 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 4 comments

aaargh! cdbs...

Steinar suggests that he doesn't like cdbs. He's not alone. cdbs may make life easy for the maintainer, but it can make it incredibly difficult for anybody trying to fix bugs and NMU a package. I've found this myself when doing RC bugfixes during the recent round of BSPs; I must admit that more than once I've started looking into a bug only to give up the moment I've seen it uses cdbs.

Fixing packaging errors is much harder when all the details of the package build are hidden from you in a mass of variables and included Makefiles. Unfortunately, it seems quite a number of new inexperienced maintainers have been using cdbs with very little understanding of the magic it does behind the scenes. This doesn't bode well for the quality of their packages in my experience.

17:58 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 2 comments

Poisonous people?

At the Google Summer of Code Mentors Summit earlier this month, a couple of Subversion developers gave a presentation called "How to Protect Your Open Source Project From Poisonous People"; the slides are available online. A lot of their points are well-observed and well worth thinking about.

20:16 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 0 comments

LiMux - bringing Debian to Munich's local government

As promised yesterday in my report about the Munich BSP, I'd like to talk some more about LiMux, the project being run within the City of Munich to replace all of their desktop Windows systems with Linux. The team kindly offered us the use of their offices in central Munich as a base for the BSP last weekend, and on Sunday afternoon they gave us a demonstration and answered lots of our questions. The following is from my (known-faulty) memory...

Jan-Marek and Florian talked us through their setup. They're using FAI to automate installation of systems, along with LDAP to store lots of configuration information and GOsa as a user-friendly front-end to that configuration. They've integrated these to enable some very clever management features so that all aspects of the city-wide system can be maintained from one central point. As new machines are introduced onto the network, they can be configured into one class or another: simple desktop clients up to so-called "depot" servers, used as seeds for further clients. Individual user profiles can be tweaked, giving users access to new applications as they are needed. Shared resources like network storage and printers are set up automatically from the LDAP database. Access to USB storage devices can be controlled on a per-device, per-user basis for security.

That's quite an impressive feature list. Most of the work has been in configuration and systems work rather than custom packages on the clients themselves - the vast majority of the packages installed come straight from the standard Debian archive, with some backports (like a newer version of KDE). Building on top of standard packages means that they have access to a huge amount of Free Software without having to do all of the work themselves. A small team (10-ish at the moment, growing to 100 or so in the future) can effectively deploy and manage desktops and associated servers for a huge number of users - they're expecting to be supporting on the order of 30,000 systems 2 years from now.

The team have just recently made their first stable release and are starting to roll it out across the city, one department at a time. There are the familiar issues involved in the deployment, of course. For example, users don't want to help test pre-release versions to help nail bugs, but then complain loudly when they find bugs in the first release. And in such a large project to migrate from predominantly Windows (NT4!) desktops to KDE on Linux, a major part of the effort needed is in user training. There is quite a bit of support and custom work needed to convert people's MS Office macros over to working on top of OpenOffice. And there are still quite a number of users who will remain using Windows for specific applications that still don't have Linux equivalents yet. Apparently the "Wine Cellar" group will help on that front. *grin*

In terms of collaborating with Debian, the LiMux team are expecting to help in a few ways. As bug reports are filed against their applications (apparently very few so far), they'll be pushed upstream along with (hopefully) fixes for them. They will also be devoting some full-time developer effort to security work; it would be good for both sides if this effort can be shared.

It was quite striking to see Tux, the Linux penguin, as a visible logo in local government offices! The team have clearly made some excellent progress on this exciting project, and I'm sure that I can speak for all of Debian in wishing them the best of luck in the future. I'll be watching with interest...

02:05 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 15 comments

Congrats!

... to John and Terah

09:33 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 0 comments

Sorry to see you go

Matthew, I'm very sorry to see you leaving Debian. You have been one of the most valuable and technically capable developers in Debian in the last few years. I won't ask you to reconsider your decision to leave us - I know you will have already spent a long time thinking about it to start with. Instead, I genuinely wish you the best of luck in the future, and I hope that Ubuntu and other work will make you happier than Debian has recently.

/me raises a glass; cheers, dude...

00:13 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 1 comment

Moving irc.debian.org

We had quite a lot of discussion on the debian-project mailing list about changing the irc.debian.org CNAME to point at irc.oftc.net instead of irc.freenode.net. My early tally of public opinions went something like:

• 13 people expressed support for moving to oftc
• 3 people did not want to move
• 22 people expressed no strong preference either way
• 1 person thought we should use Jabber instead of IRC

I've had numerous other suggestions privately, via mail and (of course) IRC, in roughly similar proportions. On the strength of this support, we have decided to make the suggested move. The necesssary DNS changes will go ahead on the 4th of June.

22:59 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 4 comments

On fridges...

< sladen> Keybuk: I actually stayed in a hotel and arrived to find a post-it note stuck to the mini-bar saying "Paul: This fridge and fittings are the correct way around and do not need altering"

22:02 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 0 comments

It's your birthday...

Happy birthday to Steve Langasek!

15:59 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 0 comments

Need more time

Why are there never enough hours in the day? I want to get some of my promised debian-cd work going, but I'm struggling to keep up with day-to-day stuff at the moment. There's quite a bit of work that I think is needed in cdrtools first (not least the JTE code) before I can get on with attacking debian-cd.

00:26 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 0 comments

I blame the Finns

It seems several of us were bitten by the sauna bug when we went to Debconf in Helsinki. Nattie fell in love with the idea of "nekkid geeks" and now Joey is saying he wants to build a sauna. He's not alone - I've been considering building one in the back garden at my place, too... :-)

22:18 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 4 comments

Nearly time to go!

One morning of work to go, then I'm off to Helsinki. I'm packed and ready, including 2 boxes full of T-shirts. See you soon, guys!

03:02 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 0 comments

Now, where was I?

Gunnar asks where people were when woody released. I'll extend that (like Joey) to cover what I was doing during all the Debian releases I was personally aware of.

• Buzz (Monday June 17, 1996): Still a Slackware (hiss!) user at that point, just after my third year exams in Cambridge. On that day, I was trying to help other people around the world who had problems with their "Expertboard" motherboards; I seemed to be about the only person with information on the web about those boards at the time...!
• Rex (Thursday December 12, 1996): I had joined Debian by that time and purged all remnants of Slackware from my system. On that day, I was involved in a campaign against local road changes.
• Bo (Monday June 2, 1997): In the middle of (in theory) writing up my final-year dissertation in Cambridge. On that day, I was instead working on the college web server and organising a net connection for the shared house I was about to move into after graduation.
• Hamm (Friday July 24, 1998): At work at Plasmon, debugging a Solaris build problem. I also was helping my cousin with problems with his new computer.
• Slink (Wednesday March 9, 1999): In theory I was at work, but my mail from that day suggests I spent all day burning Slink CDs and working on slink-cd (the script to create them) instead. This was the first time I was directly involved in the CD creation effort, something I've yet to escape from... :-)
• Potato (Tuesday August 15, 2000): Again, spent most of the day dealing with creating and selling CDs. Organising a trip to the Belgian GP later that month.
• Woody (Friday July 19, 2002): Creating the woody CDs took a lot of effort. At work, new firmware for one of our libraries was causing issues.
• Sarge (end of May 2005?): Hmmm. I have a sneaking suspicion I'll be working on CD and DVD production again. It's my birthday on the 28th, and I may organise a barbecue that day...

It gets a little repetitive towards the end, but that's life as a committed mug^H^H^HDD. *grin*

13:05 :: # :: /debian/misc :: 0 comments