Free as in speech

SL2006 is over, and as usual the Debian booth was a real success. Lots of questions, lots of visitors, lots of DDs, a couple dozen Sarge DVDs handed out, congrats here and there.

4 difficult, stressful days; I’m exhausted and caught a bad cold, but it’s been a great week nonetheless.

Feedback from our (prospective) users, including individuals, companies and administrations, is very positive, and (it’s no surprise) we are still considered the top Linux distro.

Christian’s babelbox, running automated installations with the graphical installer on a 23″ LCD and picking up a new language each time, caught a lot of eyes. The feedback on the graphical installer is very good; people would like to see the Sarge installer updated to include it, together with a much-needed newer kernel.

Aurélien JARNO was demonstrating the GNU/kFreeBSD port on his laptop and that caught a number of people, too.

Some interesting projects got started on the booth, and we are now determined to set up the french association, so that it’ll be fully functional for the RMLL this summer.

I took no pictures this year, but Christian and others did, so I’ll go through the galleries and select a few pictures from those 4 days.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth, and congrats to the usual French team — we did great this time again.

My development machine passed an overnight memtest86+ and seems to be running stable for the time being, so I was able to produce the updated dgap packages.

Packages version 1.3.3-1, based on the 1.3-3 RPMs published by Digi, are available at the usual location. The 1.2 packages are still available in the pool, under the old directory; APT should be able to install them too, in case you need to downgrade to the previous version. The packages are built for Sarge and should work flawlessly on Sid and Etch too. For Woody, you’ll need to rebuild them by yourself.
APT source: deb http://debian.technologeek.org/ sarge non-free

To upgrade, apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, build and install the modules with module-assistant, then:
/etc/init.d/dgap stop
/etc/init.d/dgap start

Note that this version seems to be a pre-release. The changes compared to the previous version are pretty light, mainly bug fixes and changes to accomodate the newest kernels. Also, the sysfs interface is disabled for kernels < 2.6.15, so you may want to hold back on the upgrade if you depend on the sysfs interface.

Bug reports and comments welcome, as usual.

I got a mail this week asking for an update of the Digi AccelePort drivers packages for Debian, which I maintain out of Debian due to license restrictions on the firmware files (if somebody from Digi reads this post, please get in touch with me so we can fix this — you only need to explicitly grant permission for redistribution).

It seems there’s a new (beta?) version out which builds on kernels >= 2.6.13. If you need to use the drivers on such a kernel, unpack dgap-source.tar.gz, do the changes to the code, and repack it. Then use module-assistant to build the modules as usual and it’ll work just fine. I’d happily provide the patch, but my development machine holding my spare AccelePort Xem died yesterday evening, and I can’t get it to work reliably for more than about 30 minutes.

I’ll package the newest version of the drivers as soon as I’ll have a replacement for this machine, which should happen RSN.

The packages can be found on http://debian.technologeek.org

PS: planet readers, sorry for the flood, my last post was my first post since I upgraded to WP 2.0. It seems to be unavoidable, crappy blogging software.