The Words of the Sledge
I previously wrote about the upcoming UEFI CA rollover . Well, it's happened now - the old Microsoft UEFI CA from 2011 expired yesterday : Third Party Marketplace Root (used for signing option ROMs and other software) Subject: C=US, ST=Washington, L=Redmond, O=Microsoft Corporation, CN=Microsoft Corporation UEFI CA 2011 Validity Not Before: Jun 27 21:22:45 2011 GMT Not After : Jun 27 21:32:45 2026…
I previously wrote some advice for developers and distributions about the upcoming Microsoft CA Rollover, and I hope that was useful for people. I've now also added some user-facing documentation about the CA rollover in the Debian wiki at https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot/CAChanges . I've added guidance on managing certificate updates on Debian systems: how to check if a system needs those…
Background I'm a member of the EFI team in Debian, and I've done much of the work for Debian to support UEFI Secure Boot (SB) in recent years. We have included that support for a number of releases now, starting back with Debian 10 (aka Buster ). I'm also a long-time accredited member of the shim-review team, the group that checks and approves shim binaries before Microsoft will sign them. See the…
Again this year, Arm offered to host us for a mini-debconf in Cambridge. Roughly 60 people turned up on 10-13 October to the Arm campus, where they made us really welcome. They even had some Debian-themed treats made to spoil us! Hacking together For the first two days, we had a "mini-debcamp" with disparate group of people working on all sorts of things: Arm support, live images, browser stuff,…
It's been a while since I've posted about arm64 hardware. The last machine I spent my own money on was a SolidRun Macchiatobin , about 7 years ago. It's a small (mini-ITX) board with a 4-core arm64 SoC (4 * Cortex-A72) on it, along with things like a DIMM socket for memory, lots of networking, 3 SATA disk interfaces. The Macchiatobin was a nice machine compared to many earlier systems, but it took…
It (was) that time of year again - last weekend we hosted a bunch of nice people at our place in Cambridge for the annual Debian UK OMGWTFBBQ! Lots of friends, lots of good food and drink. Of course lots of geeky discussions about Debian, networking, random computer languages and... screws ? And of course some card games to keep us laughing into each night! Many thanks to a number of awesome…
Warning: If you're not into meat, you might want to skip the rest of this... This year, I turned 50. Wow. Lots of friends and family turned up to help me celebrate, with a BBQ (of course!). I was very grateful for a lovely set of gifts from those awesome people, and I have a number of driving experiences to book in the next year or so. I'm going to have so much fun driving silly cars on and off…
It's August Bank Holiday Weekend, we're in Cambridge. It must be the Debian UK OMGWTFBBQ! . We're about halfway through, and we've already polished off lots and lots of good food and beer. Lars is making pancakes as I write this, :-) We had an awesome game of Mao last night. People are having fun! Many thanks to a number of awesome friendly people for again sponsoring the important refreshments…
It's time for another update on Debian's firmware GR. I wrote about the problem back in April and about the vote itself a few days back . Voting closed last night and we have a result ! This is unofficial so far - the official result will follow shortly when the Project Secretary sends a signed mail to confirm it. But that's normally just a formality at this point. A Result! The headline result…
Updates Back in April I wrote about issues with how we handle firmware in Debian, and I also spoke about it at DebConf in July. Since then, we've started the General Resolution process - this led to a lot of discussion on the the debian-vote mailing list and we're now into the second week of the voting phase . The discussion has caught the interest of a few news sites along the way: Debian to vote…
TL;DR : firmware support in Debian sucks, and we need to change this. See the "My preference, and rationale" Section below. In my opinion, the way we deal with (non-free) firmware in Debian is a mess, and this is hurting many of our users daily. For a long time we've been pretending that supporting and including (non-free) firmware on Debian systems is not necessary. We don't want to have to…
It's (yet again!) been a while since I blogged last, sorry... It's been over ten years since I started in Arm , and nine since I joined Linaro as an assignee. It was wonderful working with some excellent people in both companies, but around the end of last year I started to think that it might be time to look for something new and different. As is the usual way in Cambridge, I ended up mentioning…
Preseeding is a very useful way of installing and pre-configuring a Debian system in one go. You simply supply lots of the settings that your new system will need up front, in a preseed file. The installer will use those settings instead of asking questions, and it will also pass on any extra settings via the debconf database so that any further package setup will use them. There is documentation…
Dr Charles Fox from the University of Lincoln contacted me out of the blue back in September. He asked me if I would give a couple of guest lectures to his Computer Science students. I was deeply flattered! I took him up on his invitation, and on Tuesday 28th Jan I headed up to visit him and the TSE students. My first talk was to provide background on Free and Open Source Software. I started with…
Wow, we had a hot weekend in Cambridge. About 40 people turned up to our place in Cambridge for this year's OMGWTFBBQ . Last year we were huddling under the gazebos for shelter from torrential rain; this year we again had all the gazebos up, but this time to hide from the sun instead. We saw temperatures well into the 30s, which is silly for Cambridge at the end of August. I think it's fair to say…
I was lucky enough to meet up with my extended Debian family again this year. We went back to Brazil for the first time since 2004, this time in Curitiba. And this time I didn't lose anybody's clothes! :-) I had a very busy time, as usual - lots of sessions to take part in, and lots of conversations with people from all over. As part of the Community Team (ex-AH Team), I had a lot of things to…
Lots of snacks, lots of discusssion, lots of bugs fixed! YA BSP at my place.
I've posted this analysis to Debian mailing lists already, but I'm thinking it's also useful as a blog post too. I've also fixed a few typos and added a few more details that people have suggested. This has taken a while in coming, for which I apologise. There's a lot of work involved in rebuilding the whole Debian archive, and many days spent analysing the results. You learn quite a lot, too! :-)…
As is becoming something of a tradition by now, Jo and I hosted another OMGWTFBBQ at our place last weekend. People came from far and wide to enjoy themselves. Considering the summer heatwave we've had this year, we were a little unlucky with the weather. But with the power of gazebo technology we kept (mostly!) dry... :-) I was too busy cooking and drinking etc. to take any photos myself, so here…
We had a small gathering in the Haymakers pub tonight to celebrate 25 years since Ian Murdock started the Debian project . We had 3 DPLs, a few other DDs and a few more users and community members! Good to natter with people and share some history. :-) The Raspberry Pi people even chipped in for some drinks. Cheers! The celebrations will continue at the big BBQ at my place next weekend.