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Olivier Berger (pro) Towards more CAS-related packages in Debian (SSO for web apps)

We have setup a collaborative maintenance project named pkg-cas for Debian.

The goal is to have more packages available in Debian to be able to use the CAS SSO (Single Sign On) framework for web applications.

More details at : http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianCASPackaging

Feel free to join !

Posted Wed Aug 20 14:46:41 2008

Holger Levsen Thanks to the videoteam!

So, DebConf8 is over (currently we have three machines left in the network, the video storage server, the video encoding server and my laptop...) and IMO it rocked! I really enjoyed being here, meeting many many known faces and getting to know quite some new ones and learning a bit here and there, even though I was mostly doing videoteam work

And this should be the main message of this blog post: many many thanks to all the different members of the videoteam. You have been awesome! The camera operators, the sound and video mixers, the moderators (which strictly speaking are not part of the videoteam but nonetheless helped us very much), those of you who reviewed the videos, the debconf network admins, the localteam members who prepared the venue fantastically, those who prepaid for hardware (and Debian for paying in the end) and took it here, those who helped with the set up here, the hotel staff who generally were very helpful (for example they agreed to dig holes in their walls), the absent team members who helped via irc and very much Damián Viano for his awesome work on pentabarf and Ben Hutchings for dvswitch and most of the debconf-video package.

Also I like to thank Amaya very much for bearing with me and for all the love and joy you give me! Te quiero!

Thank you all! Very very much.

(And now I'm curious who I forgot...)

I'm also really happy we got videoteam t-shirts this year and at the same time this is probably the biggest regret I have regarding the videoteam: We didn't have enough t-shirts for everyone who deserved one. But things can definitly be worse

Recordings, as much as we have them, are being uploaded at the usual place. You can help us with post processing by adding comments about problems (non-obvious ones only, please. If a event is split into two files, thats an obvious problem), to our todo wikipage.

See you! Have fun!

Posted Sun Aug 17 05:00:10 2008

Marcos Marado How to use your blackberry as a modem in Debian After aquiring a ?BlackBerry cellphone, I wanted to use it as a modem for my laptop, running Debian. I still didn't figure how to use it via bluetooth, but via USB this are the needed steps:

* get and install libmotif 2.3.0 debian packages here
* aptitude install xaw3dg-dev xorg-dev
* As root, run
ln -s /usr/include/X11/Xaw3d /usr/include/X11/Xaw
* Install Xlt (tested with 13.0.13):

get it from http://sf.net/projects/xlt , untar it and, in its directory:
./configure --with-motif-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib --prefix=/usr 
make && make install

* Install ?XmBlackBerry:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@xmblackberry.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xmblackberry co ?XmBlackBerry
cd ?XmBlackBerry/
./CVSMake
./configure --enable-maintainer-mode --disable-shared --with-motif-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib
make
sudo make install
sudo ln -s /usr/X11R6/lib/libXm.so.4 /usr/lib/libXm.so.4

* Install libusb:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@libusb.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/libusb co libusb
cd libusb
make && make install

* Install barry:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@barry.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/barry login 
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@barry.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/barry co -P barry
cd barry
sh buildgen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install
sudo cp udev/*b* /etc/udev/rules.d/.

* connect your mobile phone to your computer, via USB
* sudo ?XmBlackBerry
- clicking in the options menu you'll see in the stderr (console where you
run this app) a /dev/pts/something , which is your GPRS device
- click "connect" and see if your phone tells you that you're connected to the desktop
* sudo vi /etc/chatscripts/blackberry

ABORT BUSY ABORT 'NO CARRIER' ABORT VOICE ABORT 'NO DIALTONE' ABORT 'NO DIAL TONE' ABORT 'NO ANSWER' ABORT DELAYED ABORT ERROR
SAY "Initializing\n"
'' ATZ
SAY "ATE\n"
OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","wap.voicestream.com"'
OK 'AT'
OK 'ATDT*99***1#'
SAY "Dialing\n"

* (change "device" here) sudo vi /etc/ppp/peers/blackberry

debug debug debug
nodetach
/dev/pts/device
115200
connect "/usr/sbin/chat -f /etc/chatscripts/blackberry"
nomultilink
defaultroute
noipdefault
ipcp-restart 7
ipcp-accept-local
ipcp-accept-remote
lcp-echo-interval 0
lcp-echo-failure 999
modem
noauth
nocrtscts
noipdefault
novj 
usepeerdns
user ""
password ""

* sudo pppd call blackberry

And you're on! Posted Sat Aug 16 17:33:00 2008

Martin F. Krafft Debunking DebConf8 rumours

Posted Sat Aug 16 17:26:23 2008

Joachim Breitner Debian on the FreeRunner

I’ve been at ?DebConf for almost two week, but haven’t blogged a lot about it. It’s mostly because we’ve been working on getting Debian to run on the OpenMoko ?FreeRunner. Today we finally sent out the official annoucement for this, because it seems that the installer script and packages seem to work so far.

Great thing about this is the sheer amount of software that’s now available on my phone. I already blogged about running Xmonad on it, and I have also ran my screen-message program, on it, as can be seen here. I only did minimal testing of the phone features, because it would be relatively expensive here in Argentinia with my German SIM card, but it seems to work as well.

Posted Fri Aug 15 18:01:51 2008

Holger Levsen What has a pirate flag to do with Debian?

Some people asked me during the group photo why I brought a pirate flag to the group picture. One explaination is is pretty simple, but not the real answer: since ?DebConf5 there always has been a pirate flag at ?DebConf. The real answer to me is, that if the content mafia wants to label the cultural technique of copying, which is as old as humankind and the base of all our inventions as "pirating", them I'm very proud and happy to be a pirate.

A somewhat longer answer will give you the films "steal this movie", part 1 and 2, which are available (under a CC licence) for direct download on homer at ?DebConf8 (please use the wired network..) or via torrents on their website.

The first part mostly tells the story of the raid of the piratebay servers in Sweden, while the second part tries (and IMO succeeds very well) to paint the bigger picture. My favorite quote from the movies is "when the winds of change are blowing, some people are building shelters and others are building windmills".

Another insightful (and scary) quote is "you can't stop filesharing without a police state", and if you look around, that's what's being tried. So why is the content mafia afraid of file sharing? It's not really because of us consumers being consumers and "stealing" some content. I'm sure they can live with the "loss", that's not the reason. What they can't stand (nor survive) is millions of consumers becoming producers (and sellers of content). That's the threat they need to prevent.

And that's in very short why I think a pirate flag is appropiate at ?DebConf. We are producers and if free production of ideas and art is only possible for pirates, I say allrrrrrright

I very much recommend these two movies to everybody who is slightly interested in this topic and look forward for part 3, which should be in production by now. I hope this blog post made you curious to watch them, even though I feel that I couldn't summarize the movies as good as I would like to. ?DebConf8 took some tolls on me. I haven't even blogged about this wunderbare conference yet

I also plan to bring a Debian flag to DebConf9 If you happen to be an artist and want to create a design, I'd be very happy. At the moment I'm not fully sure if the flag will be printed or embroidered so the design should probably pretty basic. A red swirl on white (or black?) background, maybe accompanied with the letters "Debian". Other ideas or comments?

Posted Fri Aug 15 04:41:51 2008

Wolfgang Lonien Debian is 15!

Congratulations, and happy birthday. From us and our small company, from Sander of LXer, from Ubuntu (saved as screenshot, see below), or from Steve or Ganneff.

If you follow these last links, you could even see our DPL dance. Or Wouter.

Update 08/08/19: Dr. Oliver Diedrich, known for his good and profound articles about GNU/Linux and other free software, also congratulated the Debian Project (Link to his German article in Heise Open). He also linked again to older news about Etch-n-half, both in German and English.

Posted Thu Aug 14 19:41:49 2008

Martin Albisetti Streaming at DebConf

The awesome Video Team at ?DebConf have set up, like every year, streaming video and audio for the talks and ?BoFs, so if you’re work allows it, you may want to watch some of the talks: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/Streams

In about an hour (13hs UTC), Mark Shuttleworth is giving a talk on Debian and Ubuntu collaboration, which I’m sure is worth watching.

If you miss any of the talks, a few weeks after the event is over, the videos are provided for download, so keep an eye out for them if you missed any talks you wanted to watch.

Posted Tue Aug 12 12:12:24 2008

Holger Levsen DebConf8 video streams

in seven hours ?DebConf8 will officially begin, you can participate by watching the live video streams as described on the streams info page - have fun!

The schedule for tomorrow/today is available in - follow the links for the schedule for the other days. The times are localtime which is ART and equals to UTC-3.

Apologies for the short notice. But it should not come totally surprising for most of you!

More posts about Mar del la Plata pending since 9 days, IOW since I'm here...

Posted Sun Aug 10 06:01:51 2008

Martin Albisetti bzr-upload, now with automatic transmission!

A few days ago, James Westby worked on a branch of bzr-upload, that added the upload-on-commit feature to bzr-upload. It’s now part of trunk!

This means that now you can use the –auto switch, and from now on, your commits will automagically get uploaded.

To start uploading automatically:
bzr upload --auto

To stop:
bzr upload --no-auto

In other news, bzr-upload is now packaged and waiting in the Debian NEW queue to be uploaded, thanks to Jelmer Vernooij’s packaging, and Marcela Tiznado’s sponsoring.

Posted Sat Aug 9 18:30:10 2008

Joachim Breitner Xmonad on my mobile phone

Here at DebConf 8 in Argentinia, I’m working on getting Debian to work on the OpenMoko Freerunner Smartphone. We are progressing quite nicely, soon having the same features as the official freesmartphone.org image. See the pkg-fso wiki page for more on that.

And why do we want to do that? Because we can use everything in the Debian archive on our phones!

This is the xmonad window manager, programmed in Haskell and usually running on my Desktop, now on my mobile phone! And it’s almost usable. Only problem is that the screen keyboard, metacity-keyboard, gets the focus by xmonad, so I can’t actually type into other windows. This could be fixed by configuring xmonad, but for that, I need to install ghc and I do not have these 280MB left on my SD card...

Posted Sat Aug 9 14:46:00 2008

Joachim Breitner pam-dbus: authentication by bubbles

Imagine you have a device, such as a linux phone, that allows login via ssh, e.g. when on a wireless network. You don’t want to set a password with the (limited) phone UI. On the other hand, you don’t want to allow passwordless root logins into your phone. But you do want the ability to login via ssh, after all that’s why you have bought a linux smartphone. This led me to the idea of a pam module and corresponding UI piece that asks the currently logged in user: „Hey, someone tries to login. Is that ok or not?“ This might also be useful for guest accounts on regular laptops. For more on that, see my last blog post.

So I hacked it together (actually twice, due to some unfortunate use of rm at some point), invested most of the time in learning more about the python garbage collector vs. callbacks, explicitly marked global variables and proper automake stuff. In the end I got, well, just what I wanted. A simple pam module, dubbed pam-dbus that sends a request via the dbus system bus and an autostart program (written in python for now, but I might re-implement it in C) that uses notification-daemon to get confirmation from the user.

You are welcome to try the sources and binary debian packages or have a look at the darcs repository for pam-dbus (with debian/ directory, repository browser). This will end up in Debian later, I guess.

Update: Erik Johansson pointed out that if you want to use this with ssh, you need to set UsePAM yes in /etc/ssh/ssd_config.

Posted Fri Aug 8 05:19:00 2008

Joachim Breitner Flow control with pam configuration

Usually, files in /etc/pam.d/ are simple, linear descriptions of how a user should be authenticated, e.g. „Try to authenticate him against ldap, and then against the local data base“. But sometimes, you want something more advanced, for example „If the user is called guest, please authenticate him with pam_dbus, otherwise use regular pam_unix.“ This is possible, and here I’ll note down how to do that.

There are actually two problems to solve: How to detect the username, and then how to do the flow control.

For the first problem, I recently discovered the pam_succeed_if module, that allows for relatively advanced logic for checking uids, usernames, hostnames and group membership. For our case, the line would read

auth ? pam_succeed_if.so quiet user = guest

Now what next? If we just wanted to allow unrestricted access to guest, we could put „sufficient“ for the questionmark. But we need something like if..then..else. Unfortunately (and I hope this will be fixed eventually), the only flow control available is „skip the next n lines“. So we can skip to pam_unix when this module fails (i.e. the user was someone else but guest), and if we did not skip, we can run the guest-specific module and then skip over pam_unix. So here is the complete snippet:

auth [default=2 success=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so quiet user = guest

auth [success=ok new_authtok_reqd=done ignore=ignore default=die] pam_dbus.so

auth [default=1] pam_permit.so

auth required pam_unix.so

You can read more about this advanced configuration in the PAM Administration guide. And here is the corresponding configuration for gdm, where guest can always login:

auth [default=2 success=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so quiet user = guest

auth required pam_permit.so

auth [default=1] pam_permit.so

auth required pam_unix.so

So I have a guest account with a locked password and I can allow ssh logins with a mouse click and use it directly with gdm. I probably should put the gdm configuration also in xscreensaver to not lock me out.

Posted Fri Aug 8 04:20:22 2008

Martin Albisetti Working at Canonical

So, some of you already know, and some of you, including myself, will be a bit surprised.
Starting Monday, I’m going to start working full time for Canonical.
I’ve been active in the Ubuntu community since very close to the beginning, then jumped to working on Bazaar and surrounding projects, which, btw, has one of the greatest community ever. So, working for Canonical is like going to Disneyland
I’ve been doing some contracting work on my free time (mostly for Loggerhead, which turned out great, and some UI in Launchpad), and things just got more exciting every day, until at some point things just started speeding up, and I got offered to work full time a few weeks ago. Having sorted out the remaining details yesterday, Monday is officially my first day.
I’m going to stop working actively as a lead developer at my company, have found some very qualified people to take over the work I’ve been doing, and I’m going to fully focus on making user interfaces mind-blowingly good.
I’ll also get to continue working on Loggerhead as part of my job, so expect to see the improvements to keep on landing regularly.

I’m really excited to start working full time with the smartest people in the world, doing a job that has the word revolution in it’s description!

Posted Thu Aug 7 20:44:20 2008

Martin F. Krafft The dhclient nightmare

Thank you, Ted Lemon and Paul Vixie for the ISC DHCP server and client! My days would be so boring without them. I revel in your wisdom, experience, and sheer genius when I get behind some of the design decisions you made when writing those pieces of software.

My current favourite is the hook integration into dhclient-script(8). Read what the manpage has to say about it:

[…] the client script checks for the presence of an executable /etc/dhcp3/dhclient-enter-hooks script, and if present, it invokes the script inline, using the Bourne shell . command. The entire environment documented under OPERATION is available to this script, which may modify the environment if needed to change the behaviour of the script.

Hooks which can modify the environment and thus influence all other hooks that follow, as well as the script which applies the network configuration dhclient obtained to the local machine! Yay! Genius!

You are my heroes.

NP: Pluto: Pipeline under the Ocean

Posted Tue Aug 5 16:53:08 2008

Olivier Berger (pro) New Debian package for twiki-ldapcontrib 2.99.5, new RFS

Just a note to tell that I updated my packaging of twiki-ldapcontrib in order to try and push it to Debian’s official pool.

Now we’re in sync with upstream’s latest version (2.99.5).

I hope I find a sponsor

More details at : http://picoforge.int-evry.fr/projects/twldapdeb/

Posted Tue Aug 5 16:44:47 2008

Holger Levsen Update on debian-community.org

Since at least two months I wanted to write this blog post, as I have realised that I can't give debian-community.org the love it needs. But I have even been to busy to write this Request For Help...

Since September 2007 three community planets (english, italian and german) exists and are used and (since a bit longer) there is a wiki, a mailinglist and an IRC channel (#debian-community on OFTC) and a server running this.

And then it got stalled, yet two out of three DPL candidates mentioned debian-community.org during the DPL IRC debate, believing it was alive and kicking. (Or at least not stalled as it was at that time.) The planets are alive, but that's it. Or rather that was it, there has been some activity recently!

Last week, Andreas Putzo approached me and told me he wanted to spend some of his holidays to work on the long proposed email and jabber services. And by now he already did so! Yay.

Still, please consider this request for help (or invitation still to be valid. For example, mail+jabber work now, but there is no documentation on our wiki...

There are many ways you can help, the best is to take initiative. If you want to, please join the IRC channel or send a mail to the list. I'll still hang around, but probably not much more. I certainly don't plan to stand in the way, rather the opposite. And of course, should you attend ?DebConf8, I'd also love to talk to you

So much for now, now I'll continue with other pre-Argentina todo entries

Hah. Forgot one link: if you haven't seen it yet, please take a 30 sec. look at join.fedoraproject.org. Very well done. I'd like to see debian-community.org to become a bit like that

Posted Tue Jul 29 16:42:27 2008

Wolfgang Lonien And Lenny is frozen

As mentioned this morning, Lenny is frozen now. And Holger was the first to mention it. Thanks, mate - and enjoy your stay in wonderful Madrid!

Posted Mon Jul 28 12:55:53 2008

Wolfgang Lonien Etchnhalf released

Debian 4.0r4, codenamed “Etch-and-a-half”, is finally released. The usual updates are enough if you have working Etch installations, like always. And Debian developer Philipp Kern has put up a nice list of those who contributed to the making of it. From his list:

• akira yamada
• Alexander Sack
• Alexander Schmehl
• A Mennucc1
• Andrea De Iacovo
• Andres Salomon
• Aurelien Jarno
• Charles Plessy
• Christian Perrier
• Christian Welzel
• Colin Watson
• dann frazier (indefatigable kernel worker, most sourceful uploads)
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway (3rd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Emmanuel Lacour
• Eric Dorland
• Fabio Tranchitella
• Faidon Liambotis
• Fathi Boudra
• Florian Weimer
• Francesco Paolo Lovergine
• Francois Marier
• Frank Lichtenheld
• Frans Pop (thanks for your d-i work!)
• Frederic Peters
• Gregory Colpart
• Holger Levsen
• Jan Wagner
• Jay Berkenbilt
• Jérémy Bobbio
• Joey Hess
• Joey Schulze
• Josselin Mouette
• Julien Cristau
• Kai Hendry
• Kurt Roeckx
• LaMont Jones
• Laszlo Boszormenyi
• Martin Pitt
• maximilian attems
• Michael Biebl
• Michael Koch
• Mike Hommey
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Ola Lundqvist
• Otavio Salvador
• Patrick Matthäi
• Petter Reinholdtsen
• Philipp Kern
• Pierre Habouzit
• Raphael Hertzog
• Rene Engelhard
• Robert Millan
• Roberto Lumbreras
• Roland Mas
• Romain Beauxis
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Stefan Fritsch
• Steffen Joeris
• Stephen Gran
• Steve Kemp
• Sune Vuorela
• Thijs Kinkhorst (2nd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Thomas Viehmann
• Toni Mueller
• Tzafrir Cohen

Thanks to all of you, really.

The upgrade adds support for newer hardware due to the use of a newer kernel - a first time for a Debian point release. It also corrects several bugs and defects.

And Lenny is about to be frozen as well. Good times.

Posted Mon Jul 28 01:17:48 2008

Holger Levsen Lenny frozen

Lenny has been frozen some four hours ago and still nobody blogged it yet, so I decided to break the news to those who care more about blogs and planets then old fashioned nice mailing-lists

Unfortunatly no word was said about the kernel for lenny, so I asked on #debian-release whether that means, we will release with 2.6.25, which is what's in unstable and testing atm. The answer from a release team member was: no, it will probably be 2.6.26.

Happy polishing!

/me goes back to arriving in wonderful Madrid with wonderful company

The above blog post was written yesterday but due to an user error due to being too tired I didn't manage to post it until now. But as still no one blogged about the freeze...

Posted Sun Jul 27 18:13:26 2008