EasyTag: a graphical interface to managing your music files’ tags
published on Mon Aug 25 02:31:07 2008 in packages-news
EasyTag is a graphical utility to edit the descriptive ID3 tags for your music files. One will think primarily of MP3 files, but it also does other formats, such as Ogg, FLAC, MP4/AAC, MusePack, Monkey’s Audio files and WavPack files (APE tag).
EasyTag’s screen real estate is divided into three windows. The left window shows you the directories of your file system. The middle window shows you the music files in your currently selected directory. The right window is further subdivided into top and bottom information boxes: the top shows you the technical information about the file (bit rate, frequency, mode, size, and time), and the bottom shows you the actual ID3 fields.
The ID3 fields are pretty complete as they let you fill in all the relevant info you could want to put in, e.g., title, artist, album, year, genre, personal comments. You can also attach a photo to the file.
Once you start up EasyTag, it will search your home directory for any and all music format files. This behavior is either helpful or annoying; if it’s the latter, you can simply stop the search and go to the directory of your choice. It will resume the search from there.
Tagging files
There are three ways to tag music files with EasyTag:
- Manually.
- Automatically with the “Fill Tag” scanner.
- Automatically via CDDB, which is a database for software applications to look up audio CD information over the Internet.
Manual tagging is pretty much self-explanatory (and tedious.)
Automatic Fill Tag relies on the filenames of your music files to automatically fill in the ID3 entries. EasyTag has a couple dozen formats that cover almost every imaginable case.
Automatic CDDB tagging only works if files are sorted per album and if the actual CDDB entry exists. You don’t actually have to have the CD on hand: you can search for the album ID through EasyTag. Once found, it will label the files for you.
All in all, a great way to manage and maintain information on your music files.
Availability
EasyTag is available in Debian since at least Sarge and in Ubuntu (universe) since Dapper.
Debian Project News 2008/09
published on Mon Aug 18 00:00:00 2008 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's 9th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue include:
Debian turns 15
On 16 August 1993 Ian Murdock announced a new Linux distribution namedDebian. 15 years later the project started by him is the biggest Linux distribution worldwide, offering more than 20 000 software packages maintained by over 1'000 volunteers, supporting more hardware architectures than any other Linux distribution, and providing a base for more than twenty active derivatives, like Knoppix, Skolelinux or Ubuntu.
Freespire 5 to be based on Debian
Recently acquired by the Xandros Corporation, the upcoming release of Freespire will be based on the Debian GNU/LinuxLennyrelease. The current release of Freespire (2.0.8) is still based on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).
A combined Xandros/Linspire development effort will return Freespire to its Debian GNU/Linux roots and put it in sync with Xandros Desktop Pro,said Andreas Typaldos, Xandros CEO. Freespire 5 is slated to be released in the fourth quarter of 2008.
8th annual Debian Conference finished
The 8th annual Debian Conference, allowing Users and Developers to come together, learn new techniques and discuss further development has finished yesterday on the 17th August 2008. Some results of the discussions which took place there are mentioned in this issue. Videos of the conference sessions are available (or will be soon) at the meetings archive. The video team asks for feedback. It is also possible to give feedback to speakers and topics. Since most attendees are still on their way home, the next issue of the Debian Project News will have a deeper coverage of the Debian Conference and the associated Debian Day at Buenos Aires.Debian on the OpenMoko FreeRunner
Joachim Breitner announces the start of an official Debian port to the OpenMoko FreeRunner, a smartphone that was designed and developed in a free and open manner. This enables Debian users to use the distribution of their choice even on their telephone. Installation instructions can be found on the Debian wiki.Bits from the X Strike Force
Julien Cristau reports on the newest developments within the X Strike Force. The X Strike Force is happy to announce that the configuration of the Xorg server has been considerably simplified and it is now also possible to configure video output at runtime. Furthermore new drivers have been packaged, namely the nouveau driver, a reverse-engineering effort for nVidia cards and openchrome, which will support via chipsets instead of the unmaintained via driver. The nouveau driver does not yet have release-quality but the X Strike Force asks for testing of the experimental build. xorg-server 1.5 and mesa 7.1 are also currently in experimental and are scheduled to advance to sid after the Lenny release. At around the same time, the team plans to enable hotplugging of input devices, and their configuration through hal. The X Strike Force concludes their report with a call for maintainers (DDs and non-DDs). People interested in joining the team can contact them on #debian-x on irc.debian.org, or on debian-x@lists.debian.org.Request for adoption: The Debian Jr. project
Ben Armstrong is looking for someone to take over the Debian Jr. project, since he is currently too involved with other Debian-internal projects and can no longer spend the necessary time on it. He recommends several measures to move the project forward and hopes to find a new leader for the project who will tackle these and other tasks and carry on his work on a child-friendly custom Debian distribution.Upcoming changes to supported architectures
One of the problems discussed during this year's Debian Conference was ftp-master.debian.org, the main host for the Debian archive, running into resource constraints. Joerg Jaspert announced the results: Hardware architectures, which have failed to be included in 2 successive official releases, will be moved to an other host (e.g. debian-ports.org). The main purpose is to free space for architectures that are in a better shape and therefore have higher chances of being in an release.Dropping packages in main building packages in contrib
Joerg Jaspert wondered if it is a necessary feature, that source packages of a specific component (main, contrib or non-free) may create binary packages within an other component. Some source packages in Debian main use that feature to create binary packages in contrib. Dropping this feature would ease a re-design of the central project database. When asked for the benefits of dropping this feature, Stefano Zacchiroli explained further that the database should reflect the structure of the project, especially since only the component main is an official part of Debian. Blurring the difference might confuse our users and isweird at best.
Bits from the GNU/kFreeBSD porters
Aurelien Jarno gave a status report about the kFreeBSD port. Overall it is in very good shape. Currently i386 and AMD64 based architectures are supported. It has a complete toolchain (including java) and more than 85% of all packages are built. He asked for help to qualify as a releasable architecture, since a port of the debian-installer is currently missing.FAI developer workshop at the Linuxhotel in Essen/Germany
At the weekend from 8th until 10th of August, the FAI (Fully Automatic Installation - an installation and update-management framework for Debian and other distributions) developer team met at the Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany, to make FAI fit for the Lenny release. In a productive as well as fun meeting, seven people got a lot of things done, but most importantly, they did a lot of testing of the current FAI functionality in the Lenny context.Debian Lenny to Support Low-Power NAS Systems
Martin Michlmayr updated kernels for MIPS and ARM for kernel version 2.6.26. These kernel updates bring major improvements to the ARM architecture support, which helps running Debian on low-power NAS devices like the QNAP TS-409. With 2.6.26 coming closer to lenny, lenny is coming closer to run on these devices.Future of snapshot.debian.net
Since snapshot.debian.net - a service storing all versions of all Debian packages ever uploaded to the archive including useful symlinks e.g. for browsing to specific days - has problems from time to time keeping up its disc space, Eddy Petrisor wondered, if a distributed, user supported structure for storing this huge amount of data would be a good idea. Andrew Pollock answered that Debian could spend some of its fund for this service. Cyril Brulebois added that it has been announced that snapshot.debian.net should be made an official service provided by Debian, making it easier to spend funds on it.Artwork and Desktop themes for Debian Lenny
Valessio Brito
announced
that the work for artwork and themes for the upcoming stable
release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0" Lenny has been started during
DebCamp
the hacking session before the annual Debian Conference. In the meantime and
updated
version of the desktop-base
package has been uploaded including a new default theme as
well as a second
one.
CD/DVD Image Downloads - A Reminder / rsync on ftp.debian.org
Josip Rodin noted that there seems to be a rush of CD/DVD image hoarding happening. Particularly, it seems that many people are not only downloading the first image, but the additional images (CDs 2-20+) as well. The full set of images is published so that they can be downloaded by those who do not have regular access to a reliable internet connection. However, for those who do have solid Internet connections, it is more efficient to retrieve packages directly from the repositories.Bits from the DPN editors
The editors of the Debian Project News sent a first status report on the start-up period of the DPN. After a rough start a workflow has now been established which overall works but still has some issues, including the often missing time for native speakers to proofread the drafts and for translators to prepare versions of the project news in their own language, to be sent out simultaneously with the original news. But most importantly more people are needed to contribute to the Debian Project News by writing small texts on the noteworthy news collected at each issue's development page.Other news
Lucas Nussbaum wondered if the technical solution of freezing the propagation of packages from the unstable development branch to the to-be-released-soon testing branch is adequate. Since the requirement of non-disruptive changes are more a social problem, it shouldn't be solved by strict technical measures and manual approval of exceptions.Debian Project at FrOSCon 2008
From Saturday the 23rd of August 2008 to Sunday the 24th of August 2008, the Debian Project will participate with a booth at Free and Open Source Software Conference 2008 in St. Augustin, Germany. Please see the respective events page for further details.Important Debian Security Advisories
If you would like to be kept up to date about the security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to the mailing list for security announcements.Work-needing packages
Currently 468 packages are orphaned and 120 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the recent reports to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of packages which need your help.Want to continue reading DPN?
Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.DebConf Talk Feedback
published on Fri Aug 15 22:23:00 2008 in debconf-news
Like last year, we have a feedback system available again. If you attended an event during DebConf and want to give feedback on it, including free-form text to the presenter, this is your chance!
As an attendee
To give feedback please look at the schedule and select the event you want to comment on. You will notice a box saying Did you attend this event? Give Feedback, follow its link and fill out the form.As a speaker
If you want to see what feedback your event got, please log in to the submission system and select the event you want to know more about. You will see a tab named Feedback, behind which you can find all the newly-written love letters.DebConf Gallery
published on Thu Aug 14 14:21:00 2008 in debconf-news
As in previous years we have a DebConf Gallery running.
We would like to encourage people who have taken pictures around DebCamp, DebConf and DebianDay to upload them to gallery.debconf.org.
The server is open for everyone but accounts need to be activated by admins to avoid spam. If you create an account and it isn’t confirmed within 2 hours, feel free to talk to one of the admins in person or on IRC.
Debian Project News 2008/08
published on Mon Aug 4 00:00:00 2008 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's 8th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue include:
"Lenny" frozen
Marc Brockschmidt, a Release Manager, announced thatLenny, the upcoming new stable release, has been frozen as planned. The automatic transition of new versions of packages from the development branch (
sidor
unstable) to the current testing branch (
lenny) has been stopped and new versions of packages need manual approval. New versions which fix release critical bugs, other important bugs, add documentation, or include translation fixes can be approved by the release team upon request.
Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 updated to include support for newer hardware
The Debian project released an updated version of its current stable release Debian GNU/Linux 4.0etchcalled
etch and a half. While this update mainly includes security fixes and fixes for severe bugs, the Debian project has for the first time also added support for newer hardware by adding new drivers with updated Linux kernel and X.org packages. The new drivers are optional and the old versions will still be supported.
Schedule for 8th annual Debian Conference announced
Jörg Jaspert announced the schedule the 8th annual Debian Conference which will be held from August 10th to August 16th, 2008 in Mar del Plata, Argentina. As usual the schedule should considered a "work in progress" as session slots will be filled during the conference with spontaneous sessions, including so called BoF ("Birds of a feather") sessions.Debian Days around the world
Debian users around the world are preparing to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Debian project on August 16th 2008. Currently Debian Days are planned in Nicaragua, Portugal, Italy, Bulgaria, Chile, Argentina and eight different locations in Brazil. Apart from general celebration, the Debian Days will feature install fests, talks, discussion panels, LAN parties, Debian merchandise, software demonstrations, advanced installation workshops, knowledge exchange, and much more.Limited Xen support in Lenny
A recent discussion on the debian-devel list highlighted that due to the upstream delays in getting Xen support integrated into kernels beyond 2.6.18, Lenny will need to ship with limited Xen support. Pasi Kärkkäinen explained the situation and Bastian Blank wrote an article about the options the Debian Project has. His conclusion is to support a 2.6.18 kernel in Lenny, untillenny-and-a-halfadds better Xen support. However, the release managers have not yet made a final decision.
Screenshots of GUI applications
Roberto Sanchez raised the topic of screenshots for GUI applications. Since it's often difficult to judge a package based only on the textual package description, he suggested being able to add screenshots of specific applications to Debian. This would allow package search and maintenance tools to show the user what can be expected from a specific package.Bits from the Debian Eee PC team
Ben Armstrong reported on the current activities of the Debian Eee PC team: Debian's next release Lenny will work with all of the earliest models of the Eee PC and the Eee PC team hopes to soon realize its goal of a completely DFSG free system for the earliest models of the Eee Pc. Newer models are now able to install using the atl1e ethernet driver from eeepc.debian.net; support for wireless and other aspects of the new hardware will follow soon. The wireless custom Debian-installer is also making good progress. There are currently two Debian-live USB images available: a demo of the LXDE desktop (a lightweight desktop environment that is made with the Eee PC in mind) and a minimal console-only image for rescue/backup. The team is also always looking for new members to contribute to Debian's support for the Eee Pc.SELinux and lenny
Russel Coker gave several updates on security enhanced Linux in the upcoming stable release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0Lenny.
adept package manager alpha release of version 3.0
Petr Rockai gave a report about his work on a rewritten version of adept, a package management tool for KDE. He points out that the new version of adept has improved upon the speed, reliability and user experience of previous versions. Notable among the new features he added are full text searching and handling of interactive installation prompts (for example, debconf prompts and dpkg prompts about changed configuration files).Debian Project at FrOSCon 2008
From Saturday the 23rd of August 2008 to Sunday the 24th of August 2008, the Debian Project will participate with a booth at Free and Open Source Software Conference 2008 in St. Augustin, Germany. Please see the respective events page for further details.Other news
Stefano Zacchiroli reminded package maintainers that the old pseudo-header for upstream Homepages in the package description has been replaced by a proper header which should now be used instead.New and noteworthy packages
By popular request, DPN will once again feature a list of new and noteworthy packages that have recently been added to the unstable branch. The list will feature editorial picks from the official list of new packages and will be appended to each issue of Debian Project News.Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): libgd, iceweasel, xulrunner , clamav, python2.5, icedove and cupsys. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.Work-needing packages
Currently 461 packages are orphaned and 118 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the recent reports to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of packages which need your help.Want to continue reading DPN?
Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the contributing page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.Debian Project News 2008/07
published on Mon Jul 21 00:00:00 2008 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's 7th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue:
Updates to the Lenny release process
Luk Claes sent a release update regarding the upcoming stable release Debian 5.0Lenny. An important part is that starting with next week, the transition of packages from the unstable to the testing branch will be frozen to concentrate on fixing the remaining bugs. He further reports on the various release goals; he considers them in good shape, but is a bit worried about the architecture qualification pages on wiki.debian.org, which still lack a lot of information. Porters should provide status information on these pages, so it's easier for the release team to keep themselves informed about the status of different hardware architectures.
Debian-installer to support loading of external firmware
Joey Hess announced a new feature of the Debian installer: On demand loading of firmware. Since some drivers need to load such binary blobs to the device before they can operate but the firmware is often non-free according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines, some devices could only be operated after Debian has been successfully installed and network access has been configured by adding Debian's non-free section to the package sources. Which would fail, if the network driver itself needed to load firmware to operate.Best practice for debug packages
Theodore Tso wondered about best practice for debug packages, which contain additional data to ease debugging of programs and libraries. Mike Hommey answered that debug files should be installed at the path of the non-debug files, preceded by /usr/lib/debug/ and (depending on the size of the debug data) split off in a separate package. Joerg Jaspert added that the priority of such debug packages should be extra and that they should be in the same section as the parent package.DebConf 8 website call for help
Martin Ferrari called for help for the website of the upcoming Debian Conference. A lot of information needed by travelers is missing. He sees identifying missing data as the most important task, since it's difficult to guess what foreigners might need to know when you're a local.Debian release versioning
Martin Krafft proposed changing the way Debian versions its releases. He proposed increasing the first number with each release and the second one with everypoint release/
r-releaseof the stable branch only including fixed packages, while new releases of the stable release adding new features (like the upcoming
Etch and a half) should get a five as second number to show the
halfupdate. Lars Wirzenius reminded people that Debian introduced the current versioning scheme because CD vendors feared old boxes would stay on the shelves after a point release. Others preferred a
classic two dotversioning scheme, where the first number gets increased with every new major release, the third one with
bug fixreleases and the second one with releases adding new features.
Package management unsafe? - No
A recently published study which described several attack vectors against Linux systems using their package management has recently caused some discussion. While the study was generally judged to beoversensationalized attention-grabbingthe consensus was that one weak point does remain: a potential attacker could manipulate the domain name system and redirect security.debian.org, source of security updates for Debian, to an outdated copy of that server. Plans are being drafted to add a signed time stamp to prevent this kind of attack.
Other news
Steve McIntyre sent bits from the . Besides mentioning several personnel changes already reported in past issues of the Debian Project News, he also announced his intention to improve cooperation between Debian and its derivatives. He has already contacted several derivatives, namely Linspire, Xandros and Ubuntu.Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team released, among others, advisories for the packages bind9, bind8, glibc (a DNS vulnerability), poppler, Iceweasel, MySQL, Gaim and ruby1.8. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.Work-needing packages
Currently 486 packages are orphaned and 123 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the recent reports to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete archive of packages requesting help.Want to continue reading DPN?
Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see ourHOWTO contributepage to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.
aria2: high speed command line download utility
published on Wed Jul 16 05:00:32 2008 in packages-news
Bonus article this week, submitted by Anthony Bryan and Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa.
If you’re a frequent downloader and comfortable on the command line, then you need to try out aria2. aria2 is a cross platform download utility, similar to graphical download managers except that it uses less system resources.
aria2 has a number of invaluable features such as download resuming, BitTorrent and Metalink support, segmented downloading, downloading a single file from one or multiple servers (including integrated BitTorrent and HTTP/FTP transfers), downloading many files at the same time, automatic error recovery/repair (BitTorrent and Metalink downloads only), etc.
aria2 is a command line application, but don’t let that scare you off. You can use aria2fe, a graphical front end, if that makes you more comfortable.
Keep in mind that aria2 is more for heavy downloading, and if you want a webspider then wget would be a better choice.
How to use it
The easiest way to invoke aria2 is by typing aria2c URL/fileName
$ aria2c http://host/image.iso
The URL can be either a regular URL to a file, a URL to a .torrent file, or a URL to a .metalink file. For BitTorrent and Metalink downloads, there are extra options available such as throttling upload speed, only downloading selected files, changing listening ports, and seed time and ratio. To pause a download, press Ctrl-C. You can resume the transfer by running aria2c with the same argument in the same directory.
Downloading identical files from multiple sources
aria2 supports multiple URLs for the same file. You can specify them on the command line (space separated) and aria2 will download from multiple URLs at the same time.
$ aria2c http://host/image.iso http://mirror/image.iso
This command will split the download between multiple servers. aria2 can even download the same file from BitTorrent and FTP/HTTP at the same time, while the data downloaded from FTP/HTTP is uploaded to the BitTorrent swarm.
Repairing damaged downloads
aria2 can repair downloads with errors by using the information in .torrent or .metalink files.
$ aria2c -M test.metalink --check-integrity=true
The -M option specifies a local file called test.metalink to get the information to repair the download.
Parameterized URLs
You can specify set of parts. The following command will download part of the same file from 3 servers, don’t forget to escape the parameter to avoid shell expansion.
$ aria2c -P 'http://{host1,host2,host3}/file.iso'
You can specify numeric sequence using []. This command will download image000.png through image100.png from the same server.
$ aria2c -Z -P 'http://host/image[000-100].png'
The -Z option is required if the all URIs don’t point to the same file, such as the above example.
Other options
aria2 has a lot more options, you can for instance use:
- -T filename.torrent to specify a local .torrent file.
- -M filename.metalink to specify a local .metalink file.
- -i textfile will download all the URLs listed in a textfile.
- -s for example -s2 will download a file using 2 connections.
- -j for example -j5 will download 5 files concurrently.
aria2 has many other options. To read the man page, type:
$ man aria2c
Availability
aria2 is available on most Linux distributions. Official Debian and Ubuntu package are available:
Community & developers
aria2 is actively maintained and developed by Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa. Bug reports, feature requests, and forums are found on SourceForge.
Links
email-reminder: Never forget a birthday or an anniversary again!
published on Sun Jul 13 05:00:15 2008 in packages-news
Article submitted by François Marier. Guess what? We still need you to submit good articles about software you like!
Email-Reminder is a simple tool to define events for which you want to receive a reminder by email. These reminders (sent out daily by a small cronjob) can be either on the day of the event and/or a few days beforehand.
Events can be:
- birthdays
- anniversaries
- weekly, monthly and yearly events
Sample Reminders
Here is an example of what you get in your inbox for an upcoming birthday:
From: Email-Reminder Date: Tue, 12 May 2007 04:00:22 -0400 (EDT) To: Francois Marier <fmarier@gmail.com> Subject: Trent Reznor’s birthday Hi Francois, I just want to remind you that Trent Reznor is turning 42 in 5 days. You can reach Trent Reznor at trent@example.com. Have a good day! – Sent by Email-Reminder
And here is one on the day of an anniversary:
From: Email-Reminder Date: Tue, 29 Jul 1996 04:00:11 -0400 (EDT) To: Francois Marier <fmarier@gmail.com> Subject: 15th anniversary of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Hi Francois, I just want to remind you that the 15th anniversary (Crystal) of Prince Charles and Lady Diana is today. Have a good day! – Sent by Email-Reminder
Event Definition
Events for each user are defined in an XML file (~/email-reminders) in that user’s home directory, click here to see a sample file. You don’t actually have to define each event by hand in the XML file though. Email-Reminder comes with a simple GTK user interface:
Availability
Email-Reminder has been in Debian since Sarge and in Ubuntu since Dapper. It is licensed under the GPL.
More Information
You can find out more about Email-Reminder by visiting its homepage and subscribing to its news feed.
If you want to get involved, see the roadmap and feel free to contribute some patches!
DebConf 8 website: a call for help
published on Fri Jul 11 04:15:00 2008 in debconf-news
DebConf 8 is approaching and our website is clearly not what we’d like it to be. It turns out that compiling all the useful stuff that travellers might need is not easy, so we kindly ask you —dear lazyweb—, to lend us a hand.
The most important thing we need, is to recognise missing data. When you’re a local, is difficult to know what foreigners might need to know. So, even if you don’t know the country, your different point of view could help.
The second thing is to actually get articles written, some stuff ought to be written by locals, but the majority can be researched from the web (as we already did!). Proof-reading and checking translation is also appreciated.
Send us your patches, comments and suggestions to the website queue at the RT system, or contact Tincho@OFTC. Don’t sweat over formatting: plain text is OK, if you want to provide markup, please use very spartan XHTML Strict.
Debian Project News 2008/06
published on Mon Jul 7 00:00:00 2008 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's 6th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue:
Debian Day 2008 around the Globe
16 August 2008 will mark the 15th birthday of the Debian project since its first announcement by founder Ian Murdock on comp.os.linux.development on 16 August 1993. A coordination page for local Debian User Groups organizing and announcing birthday events is already available at the Debian Wiki.DPL-initiated teams survey finished
Debian Project Leader Steve McIntyre has published the summary of the results of his teams survey. The survey yielded 116 replies, which covered a total of 77 teams. The overall result of the survey is that the vast majority of the respondents are very happy working within their respective teams, and most think that their teams are working well. Concerning negative aspects of their team work the respondents mainly named personal lack of time, the need for more team members, and a lack of communication between teams.Bits from the Testing Security Team
Nico Golde sent bits from the testing security team. He summarized the security status of the current testing branchLennyas very good and also added that even if it may appear to be so, the testing security team does not support the unstable branch
Sid. He also invited volunteers to join the team, especially to offer support for Lenny's kernel packages which are currently unsupported.
New members for two core teams
Christoph Berg announced that Wouter Verhelst and Michael Koch have been added to the New Maintainer Front Desk, while Joerg Jaspert announced that Mark Hymers has been added as new FTP Assistant.Desktop environments and menu policy
Daniel Dickinson initiated a discussion about the behavior of the three major desktop environments (KDE, GNOME and Xfce) regarding their application menu. They, as well as other desktop environments, use .desktop files supplied by applications to create their menu, while the Debian policy only requires .menu files to be supplied by Debian packages. While some people judged the .menu files to be obsoleted by .desktop files, Bernhard Link and others pointed out some disadvantages. In the end Russ Allbery proposed to start by extending the existing freedesktop.org standard for desktop files to fit Debian's needs before changing the policy.Call for talks: DebianDay Argentinia
The organizers of this year's DebianDay, a general information event taking place during the annual Debian Conference, are still searching for talks. This year's DebianDay will take place on 18 August 2008 in Buenos Aires. Attendees of this year's Debian Conference, who'll be staying in Argentina a few more days after the conference, are invited to give a talk on Debian related topics: e.g., Debian in Latin America, Internationalization in Debian, How to help Debian, Debian Live, Making a Debian derivative distribution, Packaging for Debian or other general Debian topics.Ideas for improved diversions and alternatives handling
Goswin von Brederlow proposed some changes regarding the Debian package management system's handling of diversions and alternatives. Steve Langasek found some flaws in the initial proposal, which proposed adding new control files to the packages. However, the general consensus seems to be that declaring diversions explicitly is superior to the current approach of handling diversions as alternatives in the maintainer scripts of packages.dpkg triggers and user experience
Franklin Piat voiced his concern that users might take the recent introduction of dpkg triggers (which are a mechanism for registering required actions such as man page database updates) as something negative. User's might just notice that something calledtriggersis now additionally called after packages have already been installed, without noticing that the triggers do actually save computing time during a package's installation. Charles Plessy argued that the problem might be solved by changing the text displayed to the user to something more transparent.
Meike Reichle and Alexander Schmehl married
After getting to know each other three years ago through their Debian work Debian Developers Meike Reichle and Alexander Schmehl were married on Saturday, 28 June 2008, at Lake Constance in Germany. This marks the first time two Debian Developers were joined in marriage. Several other DDs, one of whom served as the groom's best man, were present to celebrate with Meike's and Alexander's friends and families. As a wedding gift they presented a cookbook including the favourite recipes of many members of the Debian community. Version 1.1 of the book is already in the works, hopefully with a clarified license and maybe also incorporating changes required by FTBFS bugs if any are filed by the newlyweds in time. The Debian project's congratulations go out to the happy couple, and we hope this may be the start of a very joyful time in both their lives.
Other news
The 9th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics: advice on quilt usage and compatibility with new source format; update-grub's switch to using UUIDs by default; the wxwidgets2.8 upload to unstable; and volunteers needed to handle the updating of the release notes.Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team released among others advisories for the packages dbus, wordpress and pcre3. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.Work-needing packages
Currently 497 packages are orphaned and 110 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the recent reports if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete archive of packages requesting help.Want to continue reading DPN?
Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see ourHOWTO contributepage to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.
aiccu: add IPv6 connectivity to your machine
published on Sun Jul 6 04:00:39 2008 in packages-news
Article submitted by Caspar Clemens Mierau. Guess what? We still need you to submit good articles about software you like!
It’s time: no reason should prevent you from adding IPv6 connectivity to your machine. Of course it’s still an issue, as most ISPs don’t provide native IPv6. So in most cases the easiest way for you is to set up a tunnel to an IPv6 broker. There are currently several free brokers. I’ll show a simple way of getting IPv6 connectivity with the aiccu and SixXS.
Apply for an account
First you have to apply for an account on SixXS. Please note: as a kind of ISP, Sixxs really need valid information from you. You may give them a link to your Xing or LinkedIn profile.
Your application will be checked and (probably) approved. Wait for the mail. After that go to the SixXS website, request a new tunnel, and pick an entry point near you. This step also needs to be approved. Wait for the mail (it takes up to a day).
Set up aiccu
Now let’s get it running. Install the package aiccu (apt-get install aiccu). During installation you will be asked, which broker you are using. SixXS is already preconfigured, so choose it and input your account information. If everything is fine, aiccu will check SixXS and ask for your tunnel information.
Open a terminal and run ifconfig sixxs—it should show a new network interface with an IPv6 address. Now let’s check IPv6. Open Firefox and go to http://www.kame.net/. If the turtle logo is moving, your are using IPv6, if it does not, you don’t.
The SixXS credit system
You should understand the SixXS credit system. It’s used to limit users in repeating bad actions and to make sure they maintain their tunnels. For example if a static tunnel is down it will cost you some credits, thus you better keep it up. One could see the credit system as a bank, you got a credit limit and you can’t go over it and buy everything you want, but when you earn credits because your tunnel is up you can do a lot with it.
Security issues
Note that all your IPv6 traffic will be directed through the broker, so you have to take care of the security.
IPv6 content
Check http://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/ for interesting IPv6 content: high traffic news servers, the IPv6 freenode server and so on. Always keep in mind, that not every application is ready for IPv6 and many applications need to be configured for IPv6. With Debian/Ubuntu you should be able to use at least Firefox, Thunderbird, Pan, and Irssi.
aiccu is available in Debian since Etch, and in Ubuntu since Feisty
Happy networking!
Debian-administration.org on rinetd
published on Wed Jul 2 23:28:37 2008 in packages-news
Unusual non-article ahead:
Debian-administration.org has a nice article about rinetd entitled “Easily forwarding arbitrary TCP connections with rinetd”, go and check it, it is an interesting package I didn’t know about!
file: classify unknown files on the console
published on Sun Jun 29 05:00:36 2008 in packages-news
Article submitted by Caspar Clemens Mierau. Guess what? We still need you to submit good articles about software you like!
Somebody just sent you a mail with attachments that don’t have usable file extensions so you don’t really know how to handle them. Audio file? PDF? What is it? The same problem might occur after a file recovery, on web pages with upload features, etc.
While you can try to give the file an extension and open it with a software you think might be suitable, the better way is to let your computer find out what is all about. As a GNU/Linux user you probably already think “There is surely a command line tool for this”. Of course there is: the file by Ian Darwin.
It often gets automatically installed by dependencies. In any case, aptitude install file will help you. file depends on libmagic which provides patterns for the so called “magic number” detection.
Let’s assume we have the following directory with unknown files:
$ ls -l total 2152 -rw-r--r-- 1 ccm ccm 4118 2008-03-30 06:32 unknown.0 -rw-r--r-- 1 ccm ccm 10220 2008-05-06 02:23 unknown.1 -rw-r--r-- 1 ccm ccm 12693 2008-05-06 02:23 unknown.2 -rw-r--r-- 1 ccm ccm 25933 2007-10-26 07:41 unknown.3 -rw-r--r-- 1 ccm ccm 2121 2007-10-26 07:41 unknown.4 -rw-r--r-- 1 ccm ccm 185 2007-10-14 20:14 unknown.5 -rw-r--r-- 1 ccm ccm 1189011 2008-05-17 22:37 unknown.6 -rw-r--r-- 1 ccm ccm 824163 2008-02-02 05:02 unknown.7 -rw-r--r-- 1 ccm ccm 82367 2007-09-20 06:18 unknown.8 -rw-r--r-- 1 ccm ccm 8872 2006-04-24 12:43 unknown.9
Now we want to know what’s inside those black boxes. Therefore we just call file * on the console:
$ file * unknown.0: XML unknown.1: ELF 32-bit LSB relocatable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), not stripped unknown.2: ASCII C program text unknown.3: PDF document, version 1.4 unknown.4: LaTeX 2e document text unknown.5: perl script text executable unknown.6: gzip compressed data, from Unix, last modified: Wed Oct 8 16:27:09 2003 unknown.7: Ogg data, Vorbis audio, stereo, 44100 Hz, ~192003 bps, created by: Xiph.Org libVorbis I (1.0) unknown.8: PNG image data, 492 x 417, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced unknown.9: HTML document text
Hey, that’s all. Pretty impressive, isn’t it? file does even not only distinguishes binaries and text files, it even tries to guess what programming language a text file is written in. And the magic is not that much magic: for example, in case of the ZSH script it just sees a shebang pointing to the zsh in the first line of the file, a PDF file typically starts with “%PDF” and so on. It’s all about patterns.
file provides you with some command line options that make it’s usage even more helpful. The most interesting is -i as it prints out MIME-types instead of verbose file types. If you are a web developer and want to know the exact MIME-type for a file download, this can save you a lot of time:
$ file -i * unknown.0: text/xml unknown.1: application/x-object, not stripped unknown.2: text/x-c; charset=us-ascii unknown.3: application/pdf unknown.4: text/x-tex unknown.5: application/x-perl unknown.6: application/x-gzip unknown.7: application/ogg unknown.8: image/png unknown.9: text/html
Great, isn’t it? The Apache web server also uses libmagic for this purpose. With file you just use a wrapper for the same task.
file is available in Debian and Ubuntu for a long time.
Talks for DebianDay wanted
published on Fri Jun 27 02:24:00 2008 in debconf-news
This year, DebianDay will take place in Buenos Aires, on Monday August 18th, the day after DebConf ends. We are still in need of talks for DebianDay, so, if you are coming to DebConf and you’ll be staying a few more days in Argentina after the conference, you are invited to give a talk on whatever you want as long as it’s Debian related.
Some suggestions for talk subjects for DebianDay:
- Debian in Latin America
- Internationalization in Debian
- How to help Debian
- Debian Live
- Making a Debian derivative distribution
- Packaging for Debian
- … And anything else you feel might be interesting to people who are not DDs, but are interested in Debian.
We are planning on having two tracks, one for newbies and one for advanced talks; talks in Spanish are welcome, but don’t worry if you don’t speak the language, for talks in English, we will probably have a translator.
To submit a talk, just log in to your DebConf account and click in the “New event/Paper” link.
Debian Project News 2008/05
published on Mon Jun 23 00:00:00 2008 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's 5th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue:
Call for new New Maintainer Application Managers
Marc Brockschmidt, member of the New Maintainer Frontdesk, sent a call for Application Managers taking care of New Maintainers. Application Managers should have a broad experience in sponsoring and mentoring of prospective developers, a firm knowledge of the Debian Policy and Developer's Reference and at least a rough understanding of the current New Maintainer process.Backports.org keyring package?
Robert Milan stated his intention to package the keyring of the unofficial Backports.org service. This would ease the usage of this service, since the current approach to establish a trust path for the package management system is quite complicated, especially for inexperienced users. Concerns were raised because Backports.org is an unofficial service. Robert argued in favour of the inclusion, since it is often recommended to users to use the Backport service when they are in need of newer packages.How to write proper get-orig-source targets
David Paleino wondered how to deal with the get-orig-source target for debian/rules files. According to policy, this target should create the latest upstream tarball, which might mean to export a version from a version control system. During this process timestamps of files are included, causing different checksums, even if the files haven't changed. Calling gzip with the -n switch didn't solve the problem entirely, but pristine-tar seems to be the solution to the problem.Usefulness of Debian Release Goals?
Peter Eisentraut wondered about the so calledRelease Goals(global goals which should be implemented with the next release, but won't block a release if not completed). While they are good to improve the overall quality of the packages, most won't be noticed by users and most should rather become part of the policy. He also added that searching for bugs concerning release goals isn't very easy and proposed to set up an SQL database. Marc Brockschmidt added that such a database is part of a project in Google's Summer of Code.
Removing lilo?
William Pitcock asked for opinions about the removal of the boot loader lilo. Since lilo has a grave bug that is not trivial to fix and grub is pretty stable, he wondered if lilo is still needed at all. Frans Pop, member of the team developing the Debian installation system, disagreed. They would regularly receive installation reports having lilo installed. Since it needs several steps from the default installation routine to install lilo, he concludes that there's still demand for lilo packages.Report of the BSP in Utrecht
On the weekend of 14-15 June a Bug Squashing party was held in Utrecht. Thijs Kinkhorst summarised the results, which included testing of the Debian-Installer on various platforms, resolving various release critical bugs and moving forums.debian.net to an official Debian server, improving reliability and responsiveness of this popular service.Debian powers Max Planck Institute 32.8 TFlops supercomputer
The Observational Relativity and Cosmology Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover has created Germany's 4th largest supercomputer using Debian GNU/Linux. By using Debian GNU/Linux on its clusters, the Research Group reduced the amount of work needed on the hardware and software infrastructure, compared to other scientific clusters running on other distributions, allowing them to focus on their objective of detecting gravitational waves. Dr. Aulbert, one of the cluster designers said:Thomas Lange's FAI package is extremely useful for automatic deployment of Debian. For example, without much tweaking and using only two hosts, we were able to reinstall the cluster in about 2.5 hours and were only limited by those two servers' network connection.
Other News
Brice Goglin sent a report from the X strike force concerning the upcoming stable release. Since Xorg 7.4 and Xserver 1.5 which were scheduled for this year's February are late, they won't make it into the upcoming stable release, which will be shipped with Xorg 7.3 and Xserver 1.4.2.Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team released among others advisories for the packages xorg-server and typo3. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.Work-needing packages
Currently 453 packages are orphaned and 111 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the recent report if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete archive of packages requesting help.Want to continue reading DPN?
Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see ourHOWTO contributepage to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.
zsh: a REALLY nice alternative for bash
published on Wed Jun 18 14:49:21 2008 in packages-news
Article submitted by Danilo Martins. Guess what? We still need you to submit good articles about software you like!
After years using ZSH instead of BASH, I still don’t understand why isn’t everybody using it. ZSH is a complete shell that will certainly make your life easier. Give it a try.
First of all, you need it installed (duh). APT and its super cow powers will do this for you. You can simply use:
$ sudo apt-get install zsh
and you should be all set. Alternatively, you can install the package “zsh-beta”, but it tends to crash once in a while… ZSH is available on any repository of Debian and Ubuntu.
To try it out, you can simply type zsh, but you wouldn’t be very happy with the result. Let’s personalize it first. First of all, create a file named .zshrc on your home directory. Inside, you should put the text listed below (note: see the commented lines —be sure to try each of them out sometime)
### Uncomment the following line if you want to use the "command not found" Ubuntu command
#. /etc/zsh_command_not_found
### These are a really nice view of the command line. If you do not like it, comment all lines.
PS1='\033[30;47m\u:\w>\033[0m '
prompt='%U%n%u:%B%~%b# '
PROMPT2='%_> '
echo "\e[1;9]\e[8]"
RPS1='< %U%m%u >‘
### General config sets
LS_COLORS=’no=00:fi=00:di=01;34:ln=01;36:pi=40;33:so=01;35:bd=40;33;01:cd=40;33;
01:ex=01;32:mi=5;31;46:or=5;31;46:*.cmd=01;32:*.exe=01;32:*.com=01;32:*.btm=01;3
2:*.bat=01;32:*.deb=01;31:*.tar=01;31:*.tgz=01;31:*.arj=01;31:*.taz=01;31:*.lzh=
01;31:*.zip=01;31:*.z=01;31:*.Z=01;31:*.gz=01;31:*.jpg=01;35:*.gif=01;35:*.bmp=0
1;35:*.xbm=01;35:*.xpm=01;35:*.png=01;35:*.ppm=01;35:’
LS_OPTIONS=”-F -B –color=auto”
### Default definitions
## I use MOST as my default pager. You should too, but it’s up to you
#PAGER=/usr/bin/most
command_oriented_history=1
HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
ulimit -c unlimited
umask 022
mesg y
### LS and V aliases
alias ls=”ls $LS_OPTIONS” #–format=vertical
alias v=”ls $LS_OPTIONS –format=long”
alias l=”v”
### Export everything so far
export PS1 NLSPATH PAGER MAIL LS_COLORS LS_OPTIONS LIBRARY_PATH
C_INCLUDE_PATH CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH EDITOR TERM XFILESEARCHPATH
### History configuration
export HISTFILE=$HOME/.zsh_history
export HISTSIZE=8192
export SAVEHIST=8192
### CD shortcuts
export CDPATH=.:~
### List of file extensions you wish to ignore on a ls
export FIGNORE=”~:.o”
### These are very interesting. I will explain some of them at the end
setopt share_history
setopt appendhistory
setopt autocd
setopt automenu
setopt autopushd
setopt autoresume
setopt complete_in_word
setopt extended_glob
setopt hist_ignoredups
setopt hist_ignorespace
setopt list_types
setopt mailwarning
setopt no_flowcontrol
setopt no_hup
setopt no_notify
setopt printexitvalue
setopt pushd_ignoredups
setopt pushd_silent
### Making sure your keyboard will work on any terminal
bindkey ‘^[[1~’ beginning-of-line
bindkey ‘^[[4~’ end-of-line
bindkey ‘^[[2~’ overwrite-mode
bindkey ‘^[[3~’ delete-char
bindkey ‘^[[6~’ end-of-history
bindkey ‘^[[5~’ beginning-of-history
bindkey ‘^[^I’ reverse-menu-complete
bindkey ‘^[OA’ up-line-or-history
bindkey ‘^[[A’ up-line-or-history
bindkey ‘^[[B’ down-line-or-history
bindkey ‘^[OB’ down-line-or-history
bindkey ‘^[OD’ backward-char
bindkey ‘^[OC’ forward-char
bindkey ‘^P’ history-beginning-search-backward
bindkey ‘^N’ history-beginning-search-forward
bindkey ‘^[[[A’ run-help
bindkey ‘^[[[B’ which-command
bindkey ‘^[[[C’ where-is
bindkey ‘^D’ list-choices
### See for yourself, at the end
alias -g …=’../..’
alias -g ….=’../../..’
alias -g …..=’../../../..’
### Push History from previous sessions
fc -R $HISTFILE
### Forcing the rehash
_force_rehash() {
(( CURRENT == 1 )) && rehash
return 1
}
### Loading the completion style
zstyle ‘:completion:*’ completer
_oldlist _expand _force_rehash _complete
### Aliasing “run-help”
unalias run-help
autoload run-help
### Loading the compinit
autoload -U compinit
compinit
Now do run zsh. If you see a different prompt (specially if you did not comment the prompt lines on the .zshrc example above), it’s working. Now, it’s time you see what you can do with this.
First example. Lets suppose you’re doing a long command (cat /etc/mailcap | grep “^audio” | sed s/mplayer/gmplayer) and forget the command syntax for the sed program. You simply move your cursor to the command “sed” and press ALT-H. This should open the man page for sed. After you close the man page, you will automatically be returned with the command you were typing.
Second example. You’re connecting to a remote host using SSH. You remember that you want to use the X11 forwarding, but you don’t remember how to do this. Then, you type “ssh -” and press TAB. Yes, ZSH auto-completes not only files, but also command parameters. Be sure to try it out with whatever command you want to use.
Third example. You have a SSH key to a remote host, and you wish to copy a file from there using SCP. But you do not remember exactly where the file is. You simply type “scp user@remotehost:/home/myuser/myf”, press TAB and watch ZSH doing its amazing trick. Not only ZSH auto-completes files and parameters, but also remote files (remember that for this to work you need to have the RSA/DSA key on the remote host).
Fourth example. You want to install a Debian package (I love this one), but you don’t remember (or are too lazy to) type the whole name of the package. Instead, you simply type “apt-get install mysql-client” and press TAB, and watch ZSH magically auto-completing the package name. If you have more than one, it will list all available below, and if you keep pressing TAB it will complete through each one of them, one at a time. And yes, not only ZSH auto-completes files, parameters and remote files, but it also auto-completes package names. Well, I think we had enough of the “auto-complete” examples, didn’t we?
Fifth example. Yesterday you used a loooooong command and you are too lazy to type it all again. You also do not want to press UP until it appears. Instead of it, you simply type the beginning of the command and try the ALT-P combination. ZSH will auto-complete your command from the history. You can keep using ALT-P and swapping to the previous entries. If you missed it, ALT-N gets you to the next.
Last example. You typed apt-gey install foo bar foo2 bar2 foo3 bar3 foo4 bar4 … foo239 bar239 and pressed ENTER. Oh, shit, apt-gey does not exist. Instead of pressing UP, HOME, going to “gey” and changing it to “get”, you can simply use ^gey^get. This is a shortcut to “repeat the last command, but all occurrences of “gey” are now “get”.
If you liked the way ZSH works and want to use it as your default shell, you can always use the Enjoy!chsh command, and put /usr/bin/zsh there. It's now your default shell.
Debian Installer Lenny Beta 2 released
contributed by Frans Pop, published on Thu Jun 12 15:00:19 2008 in news, release
The Debian Installer team is proud to announce the second beta release of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux Lenny.
Improvements in this release of the installer
- This new version of the installer uses and installs the 2.6.24 kernel.
- Support for the armel (arm little endian) architecture, using the new
Embedded ABI
. Note that none of the currently supported systems support installing from CD images. - Installer images for i386 and amd64 have a new boot menu using syslinux's vesamenu. This allows for a more user-friendly selection of for example the regular or graphical installer. For the multi-architecture CD/DVD images this change means the 64-bits version of the installer needs to be selected manually from the menu. See the \ Installation Guide for details on how to use the new menu.
- The graphical installer now has full support for encrypted partitioning.
- Support for column alignment in cdebconf resulting in improved language selection in the graphical installer. This will be extended to other installer components (notably the partitioner) in future releases.
- Many improvements in the component for language, country and locale selection. The most visible are that it's now possible to back up between dialogs within the component and that the overly long full country list has been split into separate dialogs for continent and country. The installer will warn users when the translation of the installer to their language is incomplete and displays which language(s) the installer will fall back to.
- Improved support for mouse configuration for the graphical installer makes use of a serial mouse possible.
- The relatime file system mount option is now usable.
- Issues during installs from CD/DVD due to the addition of support for multiple CDs have been resolved.
- When using the KDE or Xfce CD images it is now possible to select additional tasks, similar to the normal CD set (which by default installs GNOME).
- The following additional languages are now supported: Marathi (only in the graphical installer).
Known issues in this release
- As a result of a recent switch to Perl 5.10, the installation logs will show some Perl warnings. As far as we know these are harmless and can be ignored.
- Installations in Russian (and possibly some other languages) may fail due to an error from aptitude; most languages seem unaffected.
- i386: for this release installation from floppy disk is not supported.
- i386/amd64:GRUB installation on cpqarray RAID volumes (/dev/ida/cXdX) may fail.
- arm: this release does not support Netwinder systems.
- There are still a few issues for some PowerPC subarchitectures.
- Known issues for the graphical installer:
- some non-US keymaps are not fully supported (deadkeys and combining characters do not work);
- keys for accented or special characters may not work correctly; this is a regression compared to previous releases which will hopefully be fixed again soon;
- touchpads should work, but support may not be optimal; if you experience problems, you should use an external mouse instead;
- should work on almost all PowerPC systems that have an ATI graphics card, but is unlikely to work on other PowerPC systems.
See the errata for details and a full list of known issues.
Our thanks to everybody who has contributed to this release.
Installation CDs and DVDs, other media, errata, and everything else you'll need are available from our web site.
Debian GNU Linux powers Max Planck Institute 32.8 TFlops supercomputer
contributed by andremachado, published on Wed Jun 11 23:48:45 2008 in success-stories
Debian GNU/Linux powers Max Planck Institute 32.8 TFlops supercomputer
A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics have created Germany's 4th largest supercomputer by using Debian GNU/Linux.
The Observational Relativity and Cosmology Research Group is a team of scientists working at the Hannover Branch of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Hannover, Germany. Their goal is the direct detection of gravitational waves, which were first predicted by Albert Einstein. They are working with the friends and colleagues within the LIGO Scientific Community and VIRGO.
The massive computing effort necessary for this research is provided by a Debian GNU / Linux cluster of 1342 nodes called ATLAS. Using 10+ TB RAM, approximately 1.3 PB storage and a special network able to transfer almost 4 days worth of DVD movies each second, the cluster achieves a measured performance of 32.8 TFlops. This performance places the ATLAS Debian GNU / Linux supercomputer at 4th place in Germany, 11th in Europe and 34th worldwide, at a cost of EUR 1.8m (~ US$ 2.8m).
The ATLAS Debian GNU / Linux cluster was designed, built and has been managed by Dr Henning Fehrmann and Dr Carsten Aulbert, who have been using Debian GNU / Linux for years.
ATLAS has smaller brother and sister systems in Potsdam, Germany: "Merlin" (1.3 Tflops) and "Morgane" (6 TFlops) -- also running Debian GNU / Linux and managed by Dr. Steffen Grunewald for many years; "the experience with them had been very, very good", according to Dr. Aulbert.
"Thomas Lange's FAI package is extremely useful for automatic deployment of Debian [GNU / Linux]. For example, without much tweaking and using only two hosts, we were able to reinstall the cluster in about 2.5 hours and were only limited by those two servers' network connection.", said Dr. Aulbert. Dr. Grunewald added, "FAI with its class model was a major breakthrough, in readability, functionality, and maintainability. There's no way back now."
Beyond FAI, there are other useful tools for massive scale installation, deployment and management of Debian GNU / Linux machines for various scenarios. "Debian features an extremely large set of packages, making it THE distro of choice for keeping us out of the hassle to package needed software ourselves", said Dr. Aulbert.
As additional benefits of using Debian GNU / Linux, he cited:
* the simplicity of creating own packages
* how repositories can be set-up easily (using the reprepro package)
* using clean build environments ( pbuilder and similar packages)
* and, of course, the superb packaging infrastructure in general ( dpkg, apt, aptitude, synaptic and many useful APT tools)
By using Debian GNU / Linux at its clusters, the Observational Relativity and Cosmology Research Group reduced the amount of work needed on the hardware and software infrastructure, compared to other scientific clusters running on other distributions, allowing them to focus on their objective of detecting gravitational waves.
About the ATLAS cluster
The ATLAS cluster, linpack measured 32.8 TFlops and a theoretical peak of about 50 TFlops, consists of 1342 Supermicro computer nodes ( Intel Xeon 3220 quad-cores 2,4 GHz, 8 GB RAM, 500 GB Hitachi HDD, IPMI remote management) along with 31 data servers (2x Intel Xeon E5345 2,33 GHz, 16 GB RAM, Areca 1261ML, 16x750 GB Hitachi HDD) plus 4 similar head nodes with 4 x 750 GB HDD. Those are all running Debian GNU / Linux 4.0 Etch with a few modifications like custom kernel and Condor queuing system. Additional storage space is supplied by 13 Sun Fire X4500 running Solaris 10. The system was built from off-the-shelf computers from a German company, Pyramid Computer GmbH.
One of the many special hardware components they have is the network from Woven Systems which is a hierarchical fully non-blocking network. The EFX 1000 core switch features 144 10 Gb/s CX4 ports and connects currently to 32 TRX100 edge switches which feature 48 1 Gb/s ports and 4x10 Gb/s uplinks, reaching 2880 Gb/s. Also their Sun Fire X4500 are directly connected to the core switch.
According to Dr. Grunewald, the Merlin Debian GNU / Linux Beowulf 180 nodes cluster (launched in 2002) initially ran on a rpm based distribution, but in 2004 migrated to Debian GNU / Linux after the rpm distro vendor changed its licensing model. The total computing power of the 360 CPU cores has been estimated to be more than 1.3 Tflops peak; the data storage capacity is about 20 TB mirrored.
The Morgane Debian GNU / Linux Beowulf cluster, consisting of 615 compute nodes, 15 storage nodes, and some head nodes, launched in December 2006. The total computing power of the 1230 CPU cores has been estimated to be more than 6 Tflops peak, the data storage capacity is about 100 TB.
About the Debian Project
Debian GNU / Linux is one of the free libre operating systems (GNU/Linux, GNU/Hurd, GNU/NetBSD, GNU/kFreeBSD), running 18733+ officially maintained packages on platforms, from cell phones and network devices to mainframes and supercomputers, developed by more than two thousand volunteers from all over the world who collaborate via the internet on the Debian Project.
Debian's dedication to Free Libre Open Source Software, its constitutional non-profit nature, its open and meritocratic development model, organization and social governance make it a first among free libre operating system distributions.
The Debian project's key strengths are its volunteer base, its dedication to the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Constitution, and its commitment to provide the best operating systems attainable, following a strict quality policy, working with an established QA Team and helpful users reporting bugs, suggestions, exchanging ideas, and registering experiences.
You can help Debian Project without joining it and even not being a programmer, or being a development and or service partner company or institution at the Debian Partner Program, or simply making various donations to the Debian Project.
Debian Project news, press releases and press coverage can be found from the official Debian wiki page. PR contact at debian-publicity list.
Debian Project News 2008/04
published on Mon Jun 9 00:00:00 2008 in weekly-news
Welcome to this year's 4th issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian
community.
Some of the topics covered in this issue:
Release Update
Marc Brockschmidt reported about the status of the upcoming stable release. After some major transitions, like the ocaml transitionLennyis in good shape, but still a lot of work needs to be done. Since the armel architecture made great improvements the release team decided to upgrade it to a proper release architecture.
Debian Installer for Lenny Beta-2 ready for testing
The second beta version of the Debian Installer for the upcoming releaseLennyhas been released. Some new or improved features are:
Bits from the ftp-masters
Joerg Jaspert sent outbits from the ftp-masterscontaining recent activities of that team, including some personnel changes as well as a lot of code changes regarding Debian's infrastructure improving the overall teamwork, for example by making it easier for the release team to handle transitions. He also asked for volunteers for new ftp assistants. Later he reported that he already got four volunteers as well as several other suggestions for improvements.
Report from LinuxTag 2008
Bastian Venthur and Noel Koethe reported about this year's Debian booth at the LinuxTag 2008, a major conference about free software in Europe. Marko Jung, one of the organisers, added thanks for the good job the booth staff did. He also notes, that there was a high demand from the visitors' side for a Debian sub-conference at next year's LinuxTag.Handling of removed packages
Marc Brockschmidt wondered about the proper way to handle packages removed between two releases. One of his major concerns are packages becoming unsupported without users noticing it. Several people replied, that package management tools are already trying to notify users, while Frans Pop pointed out, that the release notes have a chapter handling this issue.French debconf translations completed
Christian Perrier reported that the french translation team finished translating all templates for the debconf system, helping users to configure packages on installation time. He notes, that some of these packages still need to add the translated templates. German, Czech and Portuguese are also quite close to the 100% mark.Call for help by the German translation team
The German translation team sent a call for help for the translation of package descriptions. The upcoming stable release will support showing users translated descriptions of available packages, but currently only 2100 of the more than 18000 package descriptions are translated to German. The statistics for other languages are similar. Information on how to help the ongoing translation effort is available at our website.Other News
The 8th issue of the miscellaneous news for developers has been released and covers the following topics: Minor update to the mailing list code of conduct, Document aimed at upstreams in preparation, d-i beta2 in preparation (breaks beta 1), Newtransition checktool.
Important Debian Security Advisories
Debian's Security Team released among others advisories for the packages Samba, Linux 2.6.18 and tomcat 5.5. Please look at them and take the proper measures.Work-needing packages
Currently 450 packages are orphaned and 107 packages are up for adoption. Please take a look at the recent reports if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete archive of packages requesting help.Want to continue reading DPN?
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Ghextris: tetris clone with a hexagonal makeover
published on Sun Jun 8 18:58:21 2008 in packages-news
Article submitted by Alex Drachmann. Guess what? We still need you to submit good articles about software you like!
The object of the game is much the same as with tetris, only the frame and the falling objects are hexagons. You have to slot the coloured pieces together making rows, which disappear once they are complete, the game ends if the stack of pieces reaches the celling.
Hexagons are hard to stack, so the game is more challenging than other games of its type, but it gets easier with practice. The game play gets rapidly challenging, as you make mistakes or run out of room and to make it worse, the objects you get are often the most useless for the job, plus it seems as if they fall at an increasingly faster rate. A score is kept based on how many lines you complete. Your current score and the highest score can be viewed on the bottom of the window, so you can try to match or beat your best score or that of a friend.
The interface and graphics are simple and integrates nicely in with the gnome environment. The colouring of the pieces is plain, with no texture or shading, so it doesn’t distract away from the game play. The top bar has two entries: play and hepl. The play menu has three actions, «play» (keyboard shortcut: ctrl+n), «pause» (ctrl+p or just p) and «quit» (ctrl+q). The help menu only has the infamous «about» option, with details about the version and author available.
The keys for playing the game are the direction keys, left and right on the keyboard, which moves the pieces left or right. The up and down keys turn the pieces 90 degrees in one direction or the other. Pressing the space bar makes the current piece crash into the slot directly beneath it.
The version I played was version 0.9.0, which is the current version in the universe repositories of Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 and in the Debian repositories. Ghextris is available in all current releases of Debian and Ubuntu.
The official site of the game is: http://mjr.iki.fi/software/ghextris.
The author of the game and lone developer of it is Mikko Rauhala, who admits to being inspired by a similar game called Xhextris by David Markley.