Free Software entrepreneurship: Debian, Ubuntu and beyond.
Before we proceed, let's emphasize a few things: My Testing hardware is i386 simply because I have plenty of leftovers from older days. These are hosts that I can afford to see randomly break due to transitions. Meanwhile, my desktop has been a 64-bit for over 10 years. My laptop for a bit less. Basically, my daily activities don't depend on 32-bit hardware remaining supported. I fully agree that…
My work on overhauling dhcpcd as the prime replacement for ISC's discontinued DHCP client is done. The package has achieved stability, both upstream and at Debian. The only remaining points are bug #1038882 to swap the Priorities of isc-dhcp-client and dhcpcd-base in the repository's override, and swaping ifupdown 's search order to put dhcpcd first. Meanwhile, ifupdown 's de-facto maintainer…
A lot of time has passed since my previous post on my work to make dhcpcd the drop-in replacement for the deprecated ISC dhclient a.k.a. isc-dhcp-client . Current status: Upstream now regularly produces releases and with a smaller delta than before. This makes it easier to track possible breakage. Debian packaging has essentially remained unchanged. A few Recommends were shuffled, but that's about…
Among my collection of PC hardware, I have a few rarities whose netboot implementation predates PXE. Since I recently managed to configure dnsmasq as a potent TFTP and PXE server, I figured that I'd try chainloading iPXE via BOOTP options. This required preparing a boot image using antiquated tools: $ sudo mkelf-linux --param=autoboot --output=/srv/tftp/ipxe.nbi /srv/tftp/ipxe.lkrn The host…
Given news that ISC's DHCP suite is getting deprecated by upstream and seeing how dhclient has never worked properly for DHCPv6, I decided to look into alternatives. ISC itself recommends Roy Maple's dhcpcd as a migration path. Sadly, Debian's package had been left unattended for a good 2 years. After refactoring the packaging, updating to the latest upstream and performing one NMU, I decided to…
Debian 11 (codename Bullseye ) was recently released. This was the smoothest upgrade I've experienced in some 20 years as a Debian user. In my haste, I completely forgot to first upgrade dpkg and apt , doing a straight dist-upgrade . Nonetheless, everything worked out of the box. No unresolved dependency cycles. Via my last-mile Gigabit connection, it took about 5 minutes to upgrade and reboot.…
Having to participate in many online events since the COVID crisis started, I've come to notice that few of the online clients work properly on the current Firefox ESR found in Debian . A quick visit at WebRTC Test confirmed that none of the tests in the Network and Connectivity section pass. Meanwhile, a Windows 10 laptop running Edge via the same network works just fine, so I have to assume that…
Since the freeze has slowly crept in, now is the time to revisit my pet peeve with Debian 's release process: to publish a new Debian release as soon as GNOME published a new X.XX.0 version. This is an extremely bad idea: X.XX.0 releases tend to lack polish, their translations are not up-to-date and several silly bugs that hamper the user experience (what the Ubuntu guys call "paper cuts") exist.…
While having a Debian boxen as a router feels nice, I kept on longing for something smaller and quieter. I then remembered that I still had my old WRT54GL somewhere. After upgrading the OpenWRT firmware to the latest supported version for that hardware (Backfire 10.03.1, r29592), I installed radvd and wide-dhcpv6-client . Configuring radvd to deliver consistent results was easy enough. The issue I…
Ever since X.org switched to rootless operation, the days of the Geode X.org driver have been numbered. The old codebase dates back from Geode's early days at Cyrix, was then updated by NSC to add support for their new GX2 architecture, from which AMD dropped GX1 support and added support for their new LX architecture. To put it mildly, that codebase is a serious mess. However, at least the LX…
A couple of year ago, I moved into a new flat that comes with RJ45 sockets wired for 10 Gigabit (but currently offering 1 Gigabit) Ethernet. This also meant changing the settings on my router box for my new ISP. I took this opportunity to review my router's other settings too. I'll be blogging about these over the next few posts. Adding IPv6 support to my home LAN I have been following the…
A couple of years ago, I moved into a new flat that comes with RJ45 sockets wired for 10 Gigabit (but currently offering 1 Gigabit) Ethernet. This also meant changing the settings on my router box for my new ISP. I took this opportunity to review my router's other settings too. I'll be blogging about these over the next few posts. Migrating to Predictable Network Interface Names Ever since Linus…
A couple of years ago, I moved into a new flat that comes with RJ45 sockets wired for 10 Gigabit (but currently offering 1 Gigabit) Ethernet. This also meant changing the settings on my router box for my new ISP. I took this opportunity to review my router's other settings too. I'll be blogging about these over the next few posts. GRUB fine-tuning One thing that had been annoying me ever since…
I have no idea whatsover of how I achieved this, but there you go. This citizen's legal draft is moving forward to the Finnish parliament.
I have been facing this issue since a few weeks on testing. For many weeks, it prevented upgrading dbus to the latest version that trickled to Testing. Having manually force-installed dbus via the Recovery Mode's shell, I then ran into this issue: This is a nasty one, since it also prevents performing a clean poweroff. That systemd-journald line about getting a timeout while attempting to connect…
The title says it all: Firefox is the only piece of software that shows zero sign of improvement in its performance after quadrupling the amount of RAM installed on my 64-bit desktop computer. All other applications show a significant boost in performance. Yet, among all the applications I use, Firefox is the one that most needed this speed boost. To say that this is a major disapointment is an…
Because I wanted my home router to use at least decently supported software that provides complete out-of-the-box support for native IPv6 , I recently got around upgrading my WRT54GL 's firmware from White Russian to Backfire , which is the most recent OpenWRT release that fits the hardware's limited amount of flash memory. One issue remains unanswered: In GNOME shell's top panel and WiFi menu,…
A few years ago, I remember that Ubuntu had a trick that allowed the distribution to be installed as one large file within a Windows partition. Does the same thing exist to install Debian?
I have a need for batch-processing pictures. My requirements are fairly simple: Resize the image to fit Facebook's preferred 960 pixel box. Insert Copyright, Byline and Bylinetitle into the EXIF data. Optionally, paste my watermark onto a predefined corner of the image. Optionally, adjust the white balance. Rename the file according to a specific syntax. Save the result to a predefined folder.…
Yesterday, I pushed out version 2.11.18 of the Geode X.Org driver. This is the driver used by the OLPC XO-1 and by a plethora of low-power desktops, micro notebooks and thin clients. This release mostly includes maintenance fixes of all sorts. Of noticeable interest is a fix for the long-standing issue that switching between X and a VT would result in a blank screen (this should probably be…
Over these past few months, I've been going through my personal belongings to reduce them to the bare essentials – more-or-less following the rule "If I cannot remember that I had it, I probably don't need it" – with an explicit goal to make it easier for me to relocate in the near future. Part of that iterative process has involved selling surplus items via Facebook groups. While I initially…
I guess that the time has finally come to admit that, as far as upstream development is concerned, the Geode X.Org driver is reaching retirement age: While there have indeed been recent contributions by a number of developers to keep it compilable against recent X releases, the Geode driver has accumulated too much cruft from the Cyrix and NSC days, and it hasn't seen any active contribution from…
This morning, I pushed out version 2.11.17 of the Geode X.Org driver. This is the driver used by the OLPC XO-1 and by a plethora of low-power desktops, micro notebooks and thin clients. This is a minor release. It merges conditional support for the OpenBSD MSR device (Marc Ballmer, Matthieu Herrb), fixes a condition that prevents compiling on some embedded platforms (Brian A. Lloyd) and upgrades…
I haven't blogged anything in months and figured that now might be a good time to get around that. Here it goes: Free Software While I occasionally upgrade the packaging of the software I maintain at Debian to keep up with best practices, my activity downsizing goes on. Simply put: I never had any ambition to become a Debian Developer. My involvement has always remained pragmatic and mostly from…
When GNOME 3.14 components were uploaded into Debian (just a few days before the Jessie freeze started), GNOME stopped working on two video platforms: Geode (xf86-video-geode) and NVIDIA (xf86-video-nouveau). On Geode, GDM launches into a black screen. On NVIDIA, GDM launches as expected, but then the GNOME session itself barfs with the dreaded "Oh No! Something went wrong. [Logout]" dialog during…