Free as in speech

Aurélien JARNO defended his PhD this morning, and I’m just back from attending his defense.

He did an incredible work designing and implementing a simulator for the MUSE instrument that will equip the VLT in 2012 (”first light”) and is being built now.

People working in the field are very impressed by the work he achieved, and I must add that it’s even more impressive when you know all he did in Debian and various other projects at the same time. Wow.

Congratulations Dr. JARNO!

After nearly two years stuck with rEFIt 0.7 in Debian, I’ve uploaded rEFIt 0.11 to unstable today.

There’s been a bit of work done on the package, on rEFIt itself and on the tools that come with rEFIt. I’ve also added some (useful, I hope) documentation.

This version of rEFIt supports all Intel Macs to date.

rEFIt in Debian comes with gptsync, both as a Unix command-line tool and as an EFI application. It’s the only tool shipped in the package. The other tools available in the rEFIt binary distribution by upstream (the EFI Shell and utilities) come from the TianoCore project and aren’t available in Debian. See the README.Debian in rEFIt if you want the full story.

Also rEFIt in Debian lacks the machine shutdown feature for now; this feature is part of the EFI 1.10 spec which isn’t supported by gnu-efi yet, though I have also worked on updating gnu-efi for EFI 1.10 and sent this upstream. Filesystem drivers are also affected by this and, as such, are unavailable too.

If you’re interested in the gory details, see the changelog and patches.

Because a lolcat is worth a thousand jokes, here are 3 of them.

Thanks to rominet for coming up with those :-)

Dear Daniel,

It looks like you are referring to my post, though you got my name wrong so that wasn’t immediately obvious.

Of course this is far worse than the 2003 compromise in terms of the direct, known and quantifiable impact it has on our users. I don’t think I stated otherwise, so I hardly see why your post starts with “I disagree”.

NOT.

Also see #363516.

Genius.

Now regenerating every single SSH key, SSL certificate and whatever else I can identify that’s been produced by one of the Valgrind-clean openssl. Also expiring and changing every single password I’ve ever typed in a vulnerable SSH session (be it at login or in the session).

Updating the packages on the machines was fun already.

Worst Debian day ever since the 2003 compromise. And that was a BAD one.

I guess we need a new openssl maintainer, we obviously cannot trust the current one(s).

The SANE project is working on improving SANE, extending the API and ABI in a backward-compatible manner and bumping the version from 1.0.x to 1.1.x to celebrate that.

The timetable has been posted, and calls for a release of SANE 1.1.0 on July, 30th.

This will be too late for the Lenny freeze by a few weeks, which means Lenny is set to be released with SANE 1.0.19.

SANE 1.0.19 is a good, solid release, which is good news. I’m not sure 1.1.0 will be as solid as 1.0.19 is, so I won’t try to rush 1.1.0 into Lenny at the last minute.

Until the Lenny freeze, I’m going to augment the current SANE 1.0.19 with code from the SANE CVS, concentrating mostly on bugfixes and self-contained new hardware support and features.

Hence, if there is something in the SANE CVS that you would like to see in Lenny: test it, then tell me about it. You have until the end of June to do so.

Currently on my TODO list:

• pixma backend update

Currently in experimental, sane-backends 1.0.19-7:

• saned & net backend with mDNS/DNS-SD support
• debconf support for enabling saned

Comments and feedback welcome.

Trying to upgrade a craptastic server that’s proving problematic under 2.6.18 to the Etch 1/2 kernel, not only is the machine extremely sloooooow to boot, but it turns out that it’s partly due to bnx2 now requesting a firmware file, whereas the firmware is built-in in the 2.6.18 Etch kernel.

Of course, the machine has no working network access due to this, and, to make things even worse, the firmware file is nowhere to be found. No firmware-nonfree in etch-proposed-updates and it’s not in the firmware-nonfree package in unstable.

You’d better hide your kittens, for Etch 1/2 makes me want to kill a large number of kittens.

Dear Jaldhar,

I wrote the post you’re referring to knowing that only one person had been stupid enough to title his post “Is Debian dying?”, so before you go on writing I’m insulting a group of people (at least I’m reading your post this way), please do your research.

Lucas’ post is about the worst PR we can imagine. There’s nothing more stupid to do than what he did. That’s the PR equivalent of committing suicide, mostly. It’s seriously hindering the work some of us are doing, publicizing Debian, going to trade shows, etc. It’s not only stupid, it’s hurting people who do this work.

What’s worse, the post comes with comments from random nobodies, who have nothing to do with Debian, don’t have the first clue about how the Project works internally, yet they can tell that Debian is dying and grinding to a halt. Not to mention it’s been publicized yet again by some “journalist”.

I’ve known Lucas for a long time now. I know where I stand. And I maintain my previous post in full, like it or not.

Kthxbye.

New developer accounts have been created moments ago, “finally”.

Congratulations to all new DDs, with a special note for Aurélien GÉRÔME (ag) and Cyril BRULEBOIS (KiBi).

All of this made possible by Sam, our best DPL to date.

Also, don’t listen to the fucktards going around telling “OMG DEBIAN IS DYING!!11!1!”. They’re just that, fucktards.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/01/msg00006.html

I fear it’s a little bit too late to introduce a release goal such as this one, which will probably have quite a few (tricky) side effects.

I think it’s time to stop piling release goals, or we’re never going to release.