I just noticed that I'm no longer the last one in the list of subscribers over at Planet Debian. Pity; I used to be quite proud of it.

Zac, take good care of it

Sick and tired of hardware.

There are days when I long for the time when I used proprietary software.

Aahh. Noo. Don't!

Really. I love Debian; it's a wonderful system. The fact that it is so cross-platform allows me to choose my hardware platform based on my actual requirements, rather than on the available software for that platform. The fact that it's Free Software allows me to modify the system the way I want it to, and also gives me peace of mind that nobody is silently subverting my system and sending my private data to some secret database somewhere. Or so.

But when it comes to vendor support, you're essentially stuffed.

Not that I really need vendor support. This laptop is my third; all three have had a Debian installation on it, and they all worked, at least to the extent that I could do some serious work with it. But there was always something.

• The first laptop's video interface wasn't properly supported when it came out. As a result, it was dog slow. I also had some weird problems with keyboard mapping under X. I eventually found a way to work around them, but never actually fixed the issue.
• The second laptop's video interface worked perfectly; and most of its hardware worked to satisfaction, too. I didn't get the internal wireless to work reliably, however, and there were some issues with the backlight as well. But overall, I was satisfied with the thing.
• My current laptop's internal wireless simply doesn't work. I need to get myself a USB wireless interface, but that still needs to happen. I got the LCD backlight controls to work (resulting in an enourmous reduction of battery use), and bluetooth, and everything; essentially, apart from sleep support, wireless, external video, and the modem, everything worked perfectly.

Much to my surprise, however, I now find that the LCD backlight controls don't work anymore under Debian. When I boot the system, it will put the backlight intensity to whatever was set when Mac OS was running, and leave it at that. Pbbuttonsd seems to think the screen's intensity is set at 0 all the time, rather than at what it actually is. So bye-bye, long battery life.

I'm so sick of all this. If there were anyone who would start a company that would

1. Manufacture laptops
2. Write drivers for them
3. Preload them with Debian
4. Give support afterwards, and
5. Be Europe-based,

I'd quite likely buy my next laptop there. Not that I couldn't install Debian on a laptop myself (I've already done that more than enough to be able to do this), but I really just want to get a laptop out of its box, flip it on, enter my name and a password, and start working. Potentially by running apt-get install something

Why do I need to use proprietary software to be able to do that?

Recovering Jazz

Last FOSDEM, I took jazz, my Quadra 950 that was donated to me by P2, to the booth. It only had MacOS on it, so I added another hard disk and started the d-i run. I figured it would take the whole weekend to install anyway, so why not use that as a demo.

Only forgot one little detail -- didn't mention to the people doing the actual install that the 750MB hard disk contained MacOS and was not to be wiped, because it doesn't boot without MacOS (at least not if you use the Penguin Booter and don't try EMILE, for which I'm about to file an ITP). As it turned out, debian-installer complained that the 250MB hard disk that I had prepared for Debian was too small, so the people manning the booth decided to pick the other disk instead. Bummer.

So, saturday evening I put the quadra's disk in my Mac IIci, formatted the 250MB hard disk, and copied MacOS over so that people could restart it. Only now it complained about not being able to boot, because the IIci contained System 7.0, which apparently is too old for a Quadra 950. Bummer again.

After FOSDEM, jazz had been standing in our office, untouched. I didn't really have any ideas on how to fix it, and didn't actually have time either. Yesterday, however, I thought about trying it again.

The big problem would be: how would I update MacOS on a system that won't boot? There's a some disk image that one can download on the Internet which will allow you to boot the mac from if you write it to a floppy disk, but the only thing it will allow you to do is talk to a LocalTalk connection. Need to have something at the other end to talk to, to be able to do that. Scratch that. Besides, you know how "reliable" floppy disks can be.

There's also this free (as in beer) System 7.5.3 that you can download from apple, but that's 19 disk images, which is a bit too much to download and copy by floppy. Especially if your disks don't work. A direct network connection to download those was right out. Jazz doesn't boot (so I can't download it there), while the IIci doesn't have an AAUI (so I can't connect a network cable to it). Hence, I needed another option.

One idea is this serial nullmodem cable that I have, and that contains a mac-style serial connector at one end. Unfortunately, I couldn't get that to work, for some reason.

Just as I was thinking of bringing one of my SCSI CD-ROM players on Monday, and writing a CD to copy the files over, I decided one more time to check all settings; and then, suddenly, I discovered this little option that lets you switch between LocalTalk and PPP as an IP backend. Did I ever mention how Macs are weird?

Anyway. After switching that connection to the sane option, at least the serial line worked. I didn't immediately get a PPP connection yet (the serial protocol is completely and utterly broken, and pppd being sucky doesn't help), but in the end, everything did work out as wanted.

Only I forgot how <censored> slow 56k baud is. My goodness.

I had to leave for my train before the System 7.5.3 images had been downloaded, and I still need to download Debian-installer. Might as well do that on Monday.

Once that is done, I need to...

• Upgrade MuckOS to 7.5.3
• Copy that installation to jazz's hard disk
• Download debian-installer
• Install Debian
• Try out 2.6
• Try out emile

Still a lot of work to do.

The pope is dead. Long live the pope.

Apparently the news people prepare stuff like this. They had a whole in memoriam ready, and had people positioned in Rome (on two places), in Krakau (where the pope was born), in the studio (obviously), and even in Paris (what the heck? right).

So now there no longer is a pope who's been pope for as long as I live. Yes, I was born in the same year Karol Wojtyła became pope.

Women in computing

Hanna Wallach blogged about women in computing a few days ago. Considering she's pretty involved in Debian Women and gave a talk about that subject at the last FOSDEM, the hint in there to read a HOWTO about the subject is probably well-reasoned, so I read it.

Most of the suggestions being made in that HOWTO are things that, I think, I'm already (either consciously or subconsciously) abiding by; but it was an interesting read none the less. There's one thing I'm not entirely sure I agree with, however, and it reminded me of a little story that, I think, I haven't told anyone about yet.

In 2001, when I first joined Debian, I wasn't really involved in the project yet. I had sent in a bug report or two (under my then-current email address of wouter.verhelst@advalvas.be, which I have since abandoned), and I had mailed with Adrian Bridgett, who was the Linux Gazette maintainer at that time, about newer editions of that digital magazine that had come out since his last upload. In short, IIRC, he had no time to properly maintain that package anymore (which is understandable), and asked me whether I wanted to take over. Being someone who was looking for something to do in Open Source for a while already, I was too eager to say "yes". So I applied to become a maintainer. As a result, I was officially sanctioned to be a developer before I was part of the community. In hindsight, I don't think this was a good thing.

Anyway, it meant that when I joined the debian-private mailinglist, and later on also the debian-devel mailinglist, there were a lot of names that didn't mean anything to me. Most of them were, actually; the fact that the name of Wichert Akkerman, who was DPL at that time, didn't mean anything to me until that time when I met Peter van Eynde to get my key signed should give you an idea of how little people I knew. So I learned as I got along. I had to. I learned about lot of people by lurking on some mailinglists and reading their posts.

One of the people I got to know that way was Amaya Rodrigo. Since there wasn't any area in the project that had her and me involved in quite some depth, there wasn't any specific reason for me to get to know her; but I read her posts on the two above-mentioned mailinglists, and in that way, I had gotten some idea of her personality.

Now the name "Amaya", which is a Spanish name without any obvious international equivalent (such as would be the case for "Maria"/"Mary"), didn't bear any gender connotation that I could spot; hence, I (incorrectly, subciounsciously) assumed she was a male geek. In fact, it wasn't until about a year ago that I found out. The weird thing is that, in the time between February 2001 (when I became Debian Developer) and February 2004 (when I found out about Amaya being a female geek) I had this idea of Amaya being somehow different. Not that I felt she was not as intelligent as other people, or that I had the idea of her being very young, or some other thought that I would consider a negative one; but there was something, somewhere, that made me not entirely understand her personality. It wasn't to a degree that it intrigued me; but when I found out about her being a women, the pieces of the puzzle suddenly fell into place.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to raise: The HOWTO says, at one point,

If you are unwilling to accept that women's lack of interest in computing is genetically predetermined (and I hope you aren't willing to accept it)

which seems to suggest that the author would dismiss even the possibility that genetics could have anything to do with it (unless I misunderstand Val here). Now I'm not saying that genetics absolutely and surely have to be part of the story, but I won't dismiss it as easily either. Surely if people can somehow spot a behavioural difference between men and women as I did when reading Amaya's posts, there must be something? And why couldn't that something be a difference in genes?

Then again, all this is based on just one occurrence. It could be that there's something else in Amaya's personality that made me wonder, and that it just happened to fit with some incorrect stereotype I have about women, or that I was more eager than is good for me to connect the uncertain ideas I had about her to her being a woman. But somehow, I don't think this is the case.

Busy weekend

Had a busy weekend this week. A friend of mine, Kris Wauters¹, is a member of A.V.A.C., an organisation for amateur cineasts, which means he's got a camera and makes short movies as a hobby. For his latest project, he's asked me to be his main actor.

So, I've gone to Antwerp with him, to do some shots in the Central Station yesterday, and at the Groenplaats and the underground parking under that square near the cathedral today. Yesterday's shots were quiet and easy – me walking from a train towards the station's exit – but today's shots were a different story altogether. With the exception of the shots of me arriving at the parking lot, it involved running, running, running. I'm exhausted, but it was fun to do.

I guess this officially makes me a movie star now

¹ no, that's not a misspelling of my first name, and no, he's not the famous Flemish musician and brother of Koen Wauters either

Broken hard disk

No, there's no data loss... at least not much, and in any case not with my system.

A few weeks ago, I rearranged my systems. rock became pop, folk was decommissioned (as was the old pop), and an SMP box that was given to me by Osamu Aoki became the new rock.

This last time, however, there was some problem. After placing pop's hard disk in its new home, and trying to boot it, I got an error messages from the BIOS instead of a booting system. So I tried to investigate. As pop is my parents' machine, and as they still run Windows after a failed attempt of mine to convert them, this means their data is on a VFAT partition. So I would boot pop from the Windows installation CD-ROM, and ran scandisk.

... which would find a lot of inconsistencies. At first, I instructed it to fix them; but as the number of inconsistencies turned out to be increasingly high, I told it to stop, and took a closer physical look at the hard disk. I didn't see anything wrong with it, but looking around on the disk showed an extremely corrupt data partition. My worst nightmare...

Actually, my dad's. But still.

At that point, I disconnected the hard disk from pop, and installed pop using a separate hard disk. Osamu had given me two spare hard disks along with the system he so nicely donated, so I could certainly use one of those disks. Pop's been running for a month or two with the new disk now, and it seems fine.

Of course, dad still wanted his data back. Something had gone wrong with the disk, and I didn't know what; I had put it back in the original pop, and had tried to boot that thing with a boot disk, s that I could exclude the possibility that it was in fact that machine being terribly broken, or so. Didn't appear to be the case – the disk showed corruption there, too.

It took me a few weeks of hoping the problem would go away until I got the idea of calling a friend of mine to help me out, as two minds know more than one. Kris had a look at the disk yesterday, saw that one of the IDE connector pins had broken off at the soldering point, soldered a wire in between, ran some recovering software on the disk, and copied dad's data to a CD-ROM.

To think that it was something that easy...

It does make me wonder about the quality of hard disks, though. The connector pin must have broken off because of the stress I put on it when removing the data cable from the disk; I can't think of anything else, and I do remember having to use quite some force to get the cable disconnected from the hard disk. Hardware sucks...

Bluetooth

I just compiled and installed GNOME Bluetooth. Nice piece of software, that allows me to send and receive files from and to my cellphone. It doesn't do much more than that at this time, unfortunately; stuff such as Evolution and/or multisync integration would be nice. But then, there's probably a reason why it hasn't been declared finished yet.

I also tried to get a hold of the Bluetooth spec. It seems to be only semi-public, though; you need to be registered to be able to access it. I'm allergic to that, especially if I don't actually need it, but have only casual interest, as is the case now.

Though one thing would be nice: a bluetooth headset implementation in software, which would allow me to pick up my phone while hacking, without having to go look for it. That'd be nice for a change; and I'm sure it could have other uses, too -- asterisk anyone?

Got root?

After a post by Rik van Riel over at Kernel Planet, I read an interview with Linspire's Michael Robertson.. Quote:

I think, like everything, it's a question of balance. Ease of use, versus security. I defy anybody to tell me why is it more secure to not run as root. Nobody really has a good answer. They say "oh, yeah, it is!", but it really isn't. Here's why: What's the most important thing on your desktop? It's the data. If someone gets access to your libraries or whatever, who cares? Your data is the most precious thing on your computer. And whether you log in as root or log in as user, you have access to that data, technically anyone who's compromising your account has access to your data as well.
(...)
So, I don't see the added benefit. I DO see it's an added pain in the ass when grandma tries to change her wallpaper, and it tells her "you don't have root privileges". What are you talking about, man? I'm just trying to use my computer, or change the clock, or any one of a hundred other things.

First, I really hope the example about grandma's wallpaper is just that – an example, and an extreme one at that. If Linspire really needs root for you to change the wallpaper, then something is very wrong.

That being said, here's a few things to consider:

• What's worse? Losing your data, or losing your data and having to reinstall your system? Considering your target customer, I'd say the latter.
• Not running as root makes it less easy for a viral attachment that my dad likes to doubleclick on (in a Stef Murky sort of way) to be automatically started at boot, and thus makes it less easy for my dad's computer to be part of this DDoS-attack against whitehouse.gov. The fact that non-root can't modify firewall rulesets will help in that area, too.
• There are a few 'reserved blocks' on your file system (by default, 5% of the total number of blocks), that only root can write to. The purpose of these blocks is so that in case of a full hard disk, root can still do things like move files around, run programs that need temporary files, or run fsck. By running everything as root, you break this assumption and, thus, create problems in case someone really fils his or her hard disk.

There are more issues, but these are the first ones I could come up with.

Banks suck.

Life too.

Belpic packages almost finished.

... and as a result, I'm almost ready to close Debian Bug #287317. Finally.

There were some issues that could be traced back to upstream making a slight error in the autotools files, and I also got some persistent lintian errors, but it now seems clean. My first library package is done

Of course, I still need to run some tests. I don't have the hardware (smartcard reader and belpic testcard) with me at this very moment, so that'll have to wait for tonight. In the mean time, I put packages up for testing at my people.debian.org webspace; although I was lazy and didn't produce a Packages file, there's packages for PowerPC, SPARC, and i386 available for download over there, and also a source package. If you're Belgian, running sarge or sid, have an electronic ID card and a smartcard reader, I'd appreciate it if you could test it.

Ska works again

A while ago, I received a Motorola VME chassis with some hardware, as a donation to the Debian project. The hardware included two MVME167 boards, an AUI, a SCSI CD-ROM disk, and some more stuff. I had used it to test and fix debian-installer on the box, and had planned to do more with it.

Unfortunately, the chassis has one weak spot: one must not leave its power cord plugged in while it's powered off. It can run 24/7 –it is designed to do that– but if you forget to unplug the power while it's switched off, it will eventually not survive that.

I forgot that once while going to work. Surely you can guess what happened. Now since I had the box for only half a year or so at that time, I felt a little embarrassed, and didn't immediately contact the guy who had donated it to me. Instead, I contacted my cousin, Koen, who's an engineer in electronics, asking him to have a look at it. Which he did. Unfortunately, he was unable to fix it without a layout schema, which I didn't have.

So, about a week ago, when Stephen Marenka talked about debian-installer support on the debian-68k mailinglist, I mentioned that its power supply was broken, and that I also couldn't find the original donator's contact address anymore.

Before I could think about it, I received a mail from one of the m68k kernel hackers who had received a box from the very same guy, and who gave me his name –Gerard Klaver– and email address; and before I could send Gerard a mail with a detailed explanation of what happened and ask him whether he had any idea on how I could fix the power module, Gerard mailed me, stating that he still had a power module which he could give me, and sent it via snail mail. I put it in the box, and it works again.

Now all that's left is for me to remember where I put the serial cable, the DB9-DB25 converter bit, and one of those AUI thingies. But I'm sure I'll manage.

Oh, and to send Gerard money (for the package) and thanks, of course. Must not forget that.

BSHB

Yes, BSHB. And since I wrote what apparently has become the Hackergotchi HOWTO, I gave it a go:

No DPL hat, but hey.

So, Branden, you don't have an excuse anymore. Your boss does it, your peers do it, and you have a hackergotchi.