~bma / journal / tags / debian

On Tuesday afternoon, I saw a message on the Debian-UK mailing list, announcing a gathering in a pub in London. The conversation in #termisoc went like this:

<@bma> Hey hex42.
<@bma> Would going to London for a drink be crazy?
<@hex42> just for a drink, yes
<@bma> http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/pipermail/debian-uk/2008-January/011130.html
<@hex42> but i suppose it depends on the drink
<@hex42> if it made me immortal i would
<@hex42> OK, that looks interesting
<@hex42> you want to go?
<@hex42> just because it's crazy doesn't mean we shouldn't do it

So, Wednesday afternoon after my lecture, Gem and I found ourselves at Plymouth station waiting for the 12:55 to Paddington. For once, the journey went smoothly; we got into London, took the tube to Leicester Square (because we knew there was a Pizza Hut there), had pizza. Next step was to get to Westminster Station (a journey, as it happens, of less than a mile). However, it was by now right in the middle of rush hour, and there’s no direct tube–so, we thought, let’s change at Green Park, two stops from Leicester Square and one from Westminster. Got to Green Park. Couldn’t get near the Jubilee Line train. Bugger. Went upstairs to the Victoria Line platform, thinking we’d go to Victoria station (one stop) then Circle/District line to Westminster (two stops, again). Platform not so busy, but train ridiculously so. Back downstairs, onto the Jubilee Line train, almost getting my bag stuck in the door and having to crouch uncomfortably in the doorway. Off at Westminster, now to find St. Steven’s Tavern. Directions say "turn right when you exit". Very useful, we thought, until it turned out that it really is right next door.

Now came the fun part. There are a few Debian developers I’d recognise, though not many, and I wasn’t sure if any of them would actually be there. We ended up waiting outside until someone (Adam Barratt, if I remember correctly) recognised Gem’s Debian shirt, who in turn called James Bromberger, who’d sent the email and would therefore hopefully know what was going on (and who happened to be right around the corner). We went inside, and attempted to find somewhere to sit. Eventually, various others turned up (Lars Wirzenius, Colin Watson, Steve Langasek, Jorge Castro, Steve McIntyre, Neil McGovern, James Westby, and others whose names I didn’t catch).

Had some interesting conversations, including about the differences between Scandinavian languages, and also advice on getting involved in Debian (I now have a couple of things which I intend to try packaging, one of which would depend on my finding out why it broke…).

Getting home was interesting, to say the least–the tube journey back to Paddington was straightforward, but when we got to the train we discovered that being on the sleeper service doesn’t necessarily mean you get a bed–or even a seat on which you can put the arm up. I was extremely glad to get home to an actual bed. Hopefully, though, I’ll get to go along to more Debiany events in future (with actual ID, so people will sign my key without getting very drunk first).

Update: Jorge Castro blogged about the meeting, and posted a photo. There should be another, where I don’t look like such a fool, but I forget who took it.

It’s a little disturbing to see people–especially Debian developers–expressing opinions like this, this, or this. Thankfully, there are also people expressing opinions like this, this, this, and this to counter it.

It’s bad enough trying to argue that opposition to sexism is "censorship", but just claiming that "Of course we are sexists…Love it or get the fuck out of there." is just idiotic. And saying that lesbians "are compared to a threesome quite favorably" isn’t sexism is just ridiculous–unless you actually believe that lesbians exist for your own pleasure (I’ll leave you to decide just how ridiculous this is); likewise, it’s not "talking about sex" that’s offensive but treating women as if they exist only for the benefit of men.

Debian is meant to be for everybody–regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or anything else at all. However, if your behaviour makes it more difficult for other groups to contribute (i.e., because you’re a sexist arse), then that’s just not acceptable, and if you don’t like it then that’s tough.

(I’m not on Planet Debian, where the argument was taking place, but I am on Planet Debian Community; maybe people to whom this applies will see this, maybe not, but I felt the need to rant anyway.)

A while back, after all the uproar with Ubuntu including proprietary, binary drivers, Mark Shuttleworth announced that there’d be a version of Ubuntu with nothing but free software. The new version of Ubuntu has been released, along with Gobuntu, a version with “no firmware, drivers, applications, or content included in Gobuntu that does not include the full source or whose license does not provide the right to use, study, modify, and redistribute the body of work”.

Unfortunately, they’ve failed already, since Gobuntu includes the non-free Firefox logo, whose licence does not permit modification or redistribution.

Now, I don’t care whether you think modifying artwork is important–it’s a stated goal of Gobuntu to have no non-free content. The logo is not non-free content, so Ubuntu have failed in their goal.

Likewise, I don’t care if you think that the licence doesn’t matter because the logo is a trademark anyway–as Mark Pilgrim points out, that’s two separate restrictions instead of one, and therefore even harder to justify.

Rich will probably make some comment about Debian developers being idiots for caring too much about freedom. He’s never managed to justify that in the past, so I suggest he doesn’t bother this time. Plenty of free software projects trademark their name and/or logo; nobody but Mozilla feel the need to get arsey about it. If someone chose to create a spyware-filled or trojaned version of Firefox, calling it Firefox and putting the Firefox logo on it, Mozilla could still stop them under trademark law and it’d still be a crime under various Misuse of Computers-type acts. There’s no need for a non-free licence.

If you want a distribution that actually cares about freedom, try Debian, which I’ve always found easier to install and use, and more memory- and space-efficient, than Ubuntu.

At TermiSoc recently there’s been talk of setting up LDAP authentication shared between all our systems, to make life easier for people wanting to run projects on Arthur–one tweak and their account on Zaphod is accessible on Arthur too. So, I decided to test it out (on Jagger, in my infinite wisdom–why screw over one production server when you’ve got another production server to screw over instead…?).

Well, all went fine, and I didn’t lock myself out or do anything silly. It did take a while to set up; I kept getting into situations where the migration scripts wouldn’t import the rest of the entries because the previous ones already exist, and I couldn’t get it to delete the entries that were in there, so I had to purge slapd and reinstall. Ah, well…I got there in the end.

Some issues:

• Debian’s adduser script only handles local users, not ones in a database. As far as I can tell, running ldapadd with the appropriate data then passwd to set the password should work, but I haven’t tested it yet.
• /etc/passwd is easily viewed and fiddled with in vi; I need some kind of browser for the LDAP directory if it’s going to be as useful as flat files (as I write this, I recall a package called phpldapadmin or some such…).
• To implement our per-host login permissions thing, we’ll need to add extra entries. This should be fairly trivial, I think, as long as we can get libpam to only pay attention to the appropriate entries.
• I’m not really happy with the encryption of the passwords; I was hoping to be able to migrate to {Free,Open}BSD-style blowfish-crypted passwords at the same time. It appears that the only options with pam_ldap are Unixy crypt(), and Novell Directory Services or MS ActiveDirectory encryption, none of which are really ideal AFAIK.

At the LUG barbecue last week, I was talking to Neil W. about getting rid of the dependency on Perl in Debian, specifically for very small systems (his main focus is on embedded devices like phones and PDAs).

I decided to give it a shot on ?bolan. The biggie is debconf, which is written in Perl. There’s a replacement, cdebconf, but unfortunately it’s even bigger, since it depends on GTK+. Now, GTK+ doesn’t have to depend on X11, it can output to a framebuffer (like recent versions of debian-installer do). However, because of some awkward dependencies, it not only depends on a lot of X11 libraries, but also defoma, the Debian Font Manager. And defoma is written in…Perl.

Unfortunately, as it’s written in C, it’s likely to be a little more difficult to dynamically load the GTK+ stuff…

Last night I upgraded ?bolan from Debian/arm to Debian/armel. The result: it’s somewhat faster at floating-point stuff (apparently, encoding an mp3 is about ten times faster).

Unfortunately, there’s no Haskell compiler for it yet, so no darcs (according to buildd.net, ghc6 is currently being built, so with luck it should be ready soon).

I used joeyh’s debian-installer build from 25th July, and it worked perfectly (once I remembered that the installer doesn’t support the Slug’s internal network card, and used an external one). I’m constantly impressed by the range of systems and installation methods supported by d-i: most people only ever see the CD install, but it can netboot, boot from USB, install in a chroot from another Debian (or sufficiently similar) system, or–in the case of the slug–be flashed to the internal memory, then overwrite itself with a normal bootloader and whatnot once it’s done.

Dude, you’re getting a Dell!

Whilst looking into Solaris and OpenSolaris, specifically Nexenta (which is based on Debian), I came across this article, containig predictions of the year ahead. It’s dated January, but I missed it back then.

One of them, concerning which OpenSolaris distribution will be released first, says “Maybe Debian will adopt the Solaris kernel and eschew Linux, which is stubbornly staying with GPL2.”.

Nice try, Linux Magazine. Firstly, Debian isn’t just a Linux-based OS - it also has ports to the FreeBSD and NetBSD kernels, as well as the Hurd. All of these are currently unstable, however (as is GNU/OpenSolaris, so they’d neither gain nor lose anything).

Secondly, though the GPLv2 has its problems, I fail to see what the big deal with Linux not upgrading to the GPLv3 is, since it’d be lunacy for the two licences not to be compatible. And again, Debian wouldn’t be gaining anything by switching to Solaris, since that’s under the CDDL and would thus bring in a whole host of other problems (I remember uproar on the Debian-Legal maiiling list when Nexenta was new, because it wanted to use the GNU+Debian userland stuff, but Solaris kernel and libc; with the libc, the licence means GPLed stuff can’t be linked to it without violating the GPL).

With the release of Debian 4.0 last week, it now comes with what I’ve been wanting for a while now: an install CD that’ll boot both i386 and amd64 boxen (and ppc, but my only ppc box won’t run Linux). That takes care of most of my hardware in one go - ?joplin is left out, but that’s all, since ?bolan can’t boot from CD.

There is still the unnamed alpha box belonging to TermiSoc that’s sitting in our cupboard to take care of, but let’s put that off until we actually have a SCSI cdrom drive for it to boot from, eh?

Andrew Eldritch is a Debian user, apparently. Nice taste there.

He’s also an opinionated bastard, which is always fun:

Q. Why can’t evolution science be taught in Kansas?

A. Someone has to grow up stupid and flip burgers for everybody else. It says so in the Bible.