Reviewed the dutch translation of the release notes.

After Frans J. Pop asked on the debian-l10n-dutch mailinglist to review the translation of the release notes he'd done, I went ahead and did a translation review again. It'd been a while, since I've been rather busy with other things lately (such as getting fixed NBD and vmelilo-installer packages in sarge, and being all stressed up at work).

It took me two days to do this review. Looks like the release notes are rather large this time around.

Playing with EMILE

... which stands for Early Mac Image LoadEr. Written by Laurent Vivier, this allows one to boot an m68k mac without having MacOS sitting on your hard disk as a sort of advanced firmware. I first had some issues getting it to compile with a recent enough GCC; however, Laurent told me that he had fixed that in the latest CVS version, which indeed compiles on an up-to-date Debian/m68k installation.

When running it on an m68k mac, I can now indeed scan the SCSI partition table and the likes, which is quite nice. I'm currently a bit too far away from my m68k macs (they're at the office while I'm not), but I'll test the compiled stuff later this week.

I do have some issues with it, though, and because of them I'm a bit reluctant to file the ubiquitous ITP:

• There is no support for configuration files yet. While I can obviously write shellscript wrappers that will parse some config files and run emile with the right options based on those, it's not exactly user-friendly optimal. I guess I can write some code for this, though.
• You need to do some objdump magic on the kernel before EMILE can boot it. Bummer.
• EMILE doesn't allow one to configure more than one kernel at this point. Meaning, you had better not made a mistake if you upgrade your kernel, or you might end up with an unbootable system. Not a very nice thing.

Despite these issues, I'm excited that there now finally is a mac68k bootloader that does not require 40M of an ugly operating system just so you can boot the box; and while some of the above issues might be hard to fix them (especially the multiple-kernel one, as by looking at the code it doesn't appear emile can accept input from the keyboard somehow), I'm confident it should not be hard to provide a fix to most, if not all, of these issues.

NetBSD

ska, my MVME167, has two disks. One of them contains a working and reasonably up-to-date Debian/m68k unstable installation; the other can contain any number of things, which I update every once in a while — it's mainly used for debian-installer testing (which is now mostly finished for Sarge; I'll probably not revisit that before Etch releases). Now, both for fun and to see how Debian compares against NetBSD, I wanted to install the latter on that disk. It's not that I really really need NetBSD, but if they have support for some hardware in my chassis that Debian does not, porting the drivers would be a nice project.

Reading the installation instructions, I quickly found out that they're quite... strange. To do a network-based install on NetBSD, you apparently have to:

• Set up an NFS root
• Set up a TFTP server (which I already have, no big deal)
• Get the kernel and the bootloader on the TFTP server (no big deal either)
• Boot the NFS root
• Partition your hard disk
• gunzip and dd a miniroot.gz to your swap partition
• Boot from your swap partition, start sysinst
• Use sysinst to format your root partition, copy files to it, and make the system bootable
• Reboot again, this time from the actual root; then, nuke the miniroot and create swapspace out of it, which you can then activate

Congratulations, you now have a running NetBSD system. I think.

Of course, when I just tried the above, I made a little error (guessing you need to gunzip the kernel as well; not sure though). As a result, I had to call dad to power-cycle ska. I decided I'll postpone the project 'till tonight or tomorrow.

Personally, I prefer Debian over that bunch of... hm... well... you know. Debian-installer is far easier to use, while still allowing you the same freedom which the NetBSD "installer" gives you; and if you don't have enough RAM, there's still the ability to set up an NFS root and use debootstrap, similarly to the only option the NetBSD folks give you. But at least on Debian, you have a reasonable choice.

Exim4 and host lists.

Andreas Barth wonders how exim4 handles host lists in conditions. He doesn't appear to be using very clear terminology, though. There are two types of conditionals in exim4.conf: conditional string expansion on the one hand (search for "Expansion conditions" in the exim4 info file), and condition parameters on ACLs or routers on the other. The conditional string expansion is what happens when you do ${if <operator>{}{}}. String expansion does indeed not let you match against host lists in any interesting way.

However, that does not mean you cannot use a host list to conditionally specify some condition, if you want that; it only means you're trying it the wrong way. Andreas appears to be wanting to vary the maximum size a mail may be depending on the host that sends it; to do that, he would need to make sure his ACL that is specified as acl_smtp_data would contain something akin to this:

  deny hosts = !+hostlist
       condition = ${if >{$message_size}{2M}{true}{false}}
       message = "mail too large, please trim your message"

and then set message_size_limit in the general options section to the limit the hosts that are in +hostlist should get. Or so.

Note, I didn't test the above, but it should work, unless I got the true and the false wrong again — wouldn't be the first time. What it does is that it will check the size of the message; and if the mail is too large, and the host is not in the host list, it will simply reject it.

Fixed my sbuild patch

I just revisited the sbuild patch to support autobuilding experimental with build-deps from experimental that I did some months back. It should work now.

I didn't actually check whether it does yet, but then the changes I just made involve just four lines. Or so.

Call me lazy.

It's installed on quickstep now, my m68k mac that's Debian's only m68k buildd for the experimental distribution (and which is keeping up nicely). If it doesn't give us any problems in the next (few) week(s), I'm sure there'll be much rejoicing.

Microsoft ads

This isn't a coincidence anymore.

Every time I look at the mass media, at an article regarding GNU/Linux, the whole page literally swarms of Microsoft ads. Microsoft's marketing really seems to focus on pulling users away from GNU/Linux these days.

This is very apparent if you go to a site which has content on a wide variety of subjects, such as heise.de or The Register. Pick a subject regarding GNU/Linux or other Free Software – Microsoft ad. Pick a subject regarding Microsoft, or even something completely unrelated to either of the two – no Microsoft ads.

They usually also pick those horrible lead-in ads, which reduce the are available for the article text itself, so that it becomes much less comfortable to read. I suspect that is on purpose.

And the winner is...

As can be seen on my website, there were 10 participants in my release pool. Now, who won?

Let's have a look. In the order that I received them bets, the following people placed a bet:

Yes, I placed a bet myself. No, I didn't frame it — heck, I didn't even win. Who did? Well, let's see. According to my rulebook, we first need to throw out those who placed a bet within 48 hours of the actual release. Since Rob McQueen was last on 2005-06-02 and we're now more than 96 hours from that time, this rule does not apply.

So, what's left is to determine who is closest to the actual release time. That's easy:

According to my mailbox, the mail to debian-announce, announcing that the release has happened, was sent on Mon, 6 Jun 2005 23:39:54 +0200, which is 2005-06-06 21:39:54 UTC.

This falls in between myself and Alexander Schmehl, but it's much closer to Alexander.

So, the winner is Alexander Schmehl.

Cheers!

(Oh, and for those who wonder: no, I didn't send myself an email. I just had a look at my clock when I placed the bet

NetBSD again

My attempt to install NetBSD on ska a few days ago failed because I had booted the wrong kernel. In the tapeimage directory of their archive, they provide a "kernel image" which really is a kernel plus a RAMdisk, and I had to use that one rather than trying to use the kernel-MVME167.gz which is in the netboot directory (hurray for clarity on that one)

After booting this thing, I have now been able to partition my disk — at least I think I have; edlabel isn't particularly helpful, allowing you to shoot yourself in the foot by creating overlapping partitions and the like, and of course it also uses its own internal partitioning format, like all the BSDs do. To make matters worse, however, there is, for example, a /dev/sd0a and a /dev/rsd0a, where the r variant allows for some sort of "raw" partition access. How ugly.

Now.

The installation instructions say that you create a system with a root partition on (r)sdXa and a swap partition on (r)sdXb; that you use dd to dump a miniroot.fs on the swap partition which you then boot from; and that you, finally, reboot the system into the miniroot.fs to allow for running sysinstall.

Only I get error messages. When trying to run dd with /dev/rsd0b as the output device, I get this:

# dd if=miniroot.fs of=/dev/rsd0b
dd: /dev/rsd0b: Read-only file system
1+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes transferred in 0.018 secs (0 bytes/sec)
#

Trying to run "mount -u -w /" (which remounts the root filesystem in read-write mode) doesn't help either. Ghaah. Morons!

I guess I'm going to have to check out whether the NetBSD folks have some sort of user support mailinglist, then. But in any case, they've lost out a lot on me. It's not as if I'm unfamiliar with the hardware in question – I tested and fixed debian-installer on the very same box.

Philip has a blog

Philip, my associate, just set up a blog of his own.

"But it's not the intention that this thing is going to be used!"

Hah. So what is?

"To stop people from nagging at me"

Rotfl.

Oh well. I guess we're not all into stuff like this. Right, Branden?

Party!

Since Sarge has now released, people are organizing parties everywhere. P2 and I thought it would be a nice thing if we'd do one in Belgium, too.

We'll be getting together in the "Domus" bar in Leuven, this friday at 21h. For practical reasons, it'd be nice if you could notify us if you're coming (so that we have some estimate), but it's no big deal if you don't.

For those who're not too familiar with Leuven: go to the Leuven train station, then follow the Bondgenotenlaan until you arrive at the Fochplein. Turn left into the Tiensestraat. A few hundred meters at your right hand side, you'll find the Domus.

NetBSD continued

One of the niceties of having a BSD wheenie as your associate is that he can be invoked if your BSD experiments fail.

Philip had a look at my setup, said "you've got your swap device and root device upside down", moved them around, and whopla! – everything worked.

Well, almost. Writing the miniroot to disk now works, but the bloody thing crashes when I reboot it. At least this bit is documented in their FAQ: "The fix is simple; remove jumper 'J1' near the top/front of the MVME167 board. This tells 167Bug to use another area of memory for its workspace."

NetBSD. Oh, how ugly thou art...

I guess I'll have to open up the box tonight and reset a jumper. Oh well.

Let's break unstable!

It appears that's what people think now that Sarge is released. My daily update today shows that:

• The gcc-4.0 transition has started;
• The GNOME 2.10 transition has started;
• Perl 5.8.7 has been uploaded;
• OpenSSH 4.1 has been uploaded;
• PostgreSQL is doing a reorganisation of its -dev packages;
• ... and probably a KDE upload will follow shortly.

If you were thinking of updating to unstable because you want a bit more of the bleeding edge, now is maybe not the right time. Of course, this was to be expected, but it's still good to tell people

Ethernet and the meaning of life

Yesterday, I had to go by the office of Dynamic Interim, whom I worked for last year when I was doing the telemarketeer job for three months. Since I received my tax form a few weeks ago, and I hadn't still received the yearly paycheck overview that they're required by law to provide me, I gave them a call – most companies send these overviews around march, so it's a little late now. Turns out they've had some problems with those things going lost in the mail in the past – and the people who make up these documents for them charge them €10 if it gets lost. So, as a policy, they don't send it unless explicitely asked to do so; if it then gets lots, it would be my responsability. Since going past their offices is only a small detour on the way to our office, I went by there yesterday and got the document.

Now when I was waiting at the nearest bus station for my bus to arrive, I smelled something. Turning around, I saw a shop called "De alternatieve tuin der wonderen" ("The alternative garden of wonders") which sells a variety of books and objects related to spirituality and similar subjects; everything from a book by the Dalai Lama on "Geluk op het werk" ("happiness at work") through weekly fortune teller appointments up to a bouddhist decorated statue of an elephant sitting in the lotus position. In the entrance, a stick of incense was burning – hence the smell. Looking past all that, I could see the shopkeeper dressed in some sort of dress, which gave me the impression that should I choose to enter his shop, he'd likely turn around, put his hands together in front of his face, and bow in front of me.

Now, right in the middle of the showwindow, on a very prominent place, was a book called "Ethernet on the first mile", by Michael Beck. According to the cover, the book talked about matters such as network security, how the EFM protocol works, and other related things.

Needless to say, this book was completely out of place. I wonder why the shopkeeper chose to add this book to his collection; likely, it's because the word "Ethernet" confused him into thinking this might have something to do with some sort of net on which you're supposed to pour ether, to help you with your meditation. Or so.

It could be an interesting idea to think of what other words in the computer business could confuse specialized book shops such as this one. Think about a book entitled "fighting with mono" which would explain how one would write small shoot-em-up games with mono (which may or may not be possible at this time) in a book shop for books about health issues. Or a book called "GNU and penguins" in a safari book shop.

Could be fun.

Apple recalling battery packs

While working on jazz, one of my m68k macs, I needed to find some documentation from apple. So, I went to the Apple support site. Not that I'd expect them to have that information as easily available as I'd like, but there's no harm in trying.

While there, I saw that they're recalling some battery packs for some of their recent laptop models. Since mine is a 12" PowerBook which was bought somewhere near the end of last 2004, and the recall affects 12" and 15" PowerBooks, and 12" iBooks which were sold between October 2004 and May 2005, I went and had a look.

Unfortunately (or perhaps, luckily), my laptop isn't affected by the problem which may cause the battery pack to overheat, so I'm not eligible to a free replacement battery pack. I wouldn't mind getting a free replacement – battery packs wear out, and while the effect isn't really noticeable yet on my laptop, getting a new replacement battery pack after only half a year would've been nice.

In any case, if you have a fairly recent Apple laptop, you may want to check out their information page on the subject and see whether your laptop is affected.

To check the serial number of my battery pack, however, I had to remove the battery pack. Since it's running only on batteries right now, I didn't think it a good idea to just go ahead and remove it; so I printed out the page (or at least intended to), and shut down the thing. Bloody printer starts to spit out page after page, each of which contains only one paragraph from the web page. Ugh. I wasn't sure whether the bug was in CUPS or in Firefox, so I instructed firefox to print the same page to a file. Opening that in ghostscript shows that the bug is most likely in firefox. Only there's a new version of firefox in incoming right now; if that contains the same problem, I'll file a full bugreport.

... Right. And now for fixing jazz

Sarge Release Party

So, yesterday a bunch of us joined in the Domus in Leuven to celebrate the release of Sarge. There were about 10-15 of us (sorry, I didn't count and I'm very bad at guessing like this). Attending were Peter 'p2' de Schrijver, Luk Claes, Geert Uytterhoeven, Frans Pop, Peter van Eynde, Peter Vandenabeele and wife, Frank 'yalu' Vandamme, Christophe Vandeplas, myself, and some others whose name I forgot (sorry guys). Had a nice time over a number of beers, discussed Life, the Universe, and Everything, and we split up around 1:30 (if I'm not mistaken) – but not before I gave a short demo of my belpic packages. Which didn't go perfectly right, considering the fact that I had 1,75l of beer in my system by that time. Oh well.

After the party, Peter van Eynde, who got there by car, was so nice to drop me off at home, where we arrived around 2:30.

Some pictures were taken; they're supposed to be going online, but I don't know where (yet).

Band of Brothers

Roel, my brother, bought the "Band of Brothers" DVD set yesterday. I've been watching it since I got home after the Sarge Release Party last night. Yes, since then – although I of course did catch some sleep in between.

For some reason, I seem to like watching war movies and war series. Not the Rambo-style heroic crap that has no touch whatsoever with reality; only those stories and movies that go out of their way to try and create a realistic depiction of what a war is like. Of course, it can't be total reality – I'm still in my sofa, and I'm still not at risk of losing my life – but still. I enjoy things like Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, and Enemy at the Gates (although that latter one is a bit over the top at times). And, yes—Band of Brothers.

I couldn't bear to watch them all in one go, however. I've done about half of them right now, and will postpone the rest of them for a later occasion. I'm sure such an occasion will be there soon.

Where's your beard?

People who know my hackergochi keep asking me where my beard went when they see me in real life. They did so at FOSDEM, and they did so at the Sarge Release Party last night. It's gone, okay?! When I keep a beard, I only do it because I'm too lazy to shave it off, anyway. Depending on the exact time, over the last two years you could have seen me without a beard, with a full beard, with a goatee, or with just a moustache. So don't be surprised if I don't look like my hackergochi anymore, please—I hardly ever do. And it's not because I "forget" to update it, either; I change this about every month.

De Racker

My sister called earlier today, asking whether I had ever had classes from a mr. De Racker while attending school at the Karel de Grote-hogeschool. Well, I did. Whether I knew this guy has been on national radio now. Well, I didn't.

Turns out mr. De Racker, who was well known when I was still on that school FOR HIS HABIT OF YELLING WHILE GIVING CLASS – resulting in most of us moving rather to the back of the room – has been taped by one of his current students. Another one then took one or two phrases from the entire recording, added some ugly techno beat, and put the result online. Being quoted completely out of context like that makes him sound as a rude and unfriendly guy (especially given the fact that those two phrases are rather... offending), but in reality he's not. His habit of yelling stems from his time when he served as a colonel in the Belgian Army; but he's an excellent teacher, who understands the art of making the most complex subject matters seem simple. I wish all teachers knew how to do that.

Now reading: HHGttG

It took me only a few months to get Philip to borrow me one of his copies of that well-known book, but here I am reading it. And enjoying it, too.

Udev sucks.

root@techno:~# ls /dev/audio*
ls: /dev/audio*: No such file or directory
root@techno:~# cd /dev
root@techno:~# ./MAKEDEV audio
root@techno:~# echo $?
0
root@techno:~# ls audio*
ls: audio*: No such file or directory

Goddamn piece of sh*t.

root@techno:~# apt-get --purge remove udev; reboot

There. That did it.

techno is my brother's computer. He's running GNU/Linux on it because the Windows 2000 he's running has already completely fallen over twice in the year he's had it; the only way to fix that those two times was to boot from the install CD and run recovery there. Trying to boot from the hard disk would give a nice BSOD every time. He's happy with Linux (it does most of what he needs, only some software packages he's learning at school aren't there, but he usually doesn't need that anyway); but if the sound doesn't work, he can't play any music, and that's not an option. I've had to fix his system's audio many times already, and it didn't work again, today. Now I don't mind having to go and fix his machine, but if it's the same thing every time...

At least DevFS would let me run MAKEDEV without complaining and without requiring me to jump through hoops. I'd need to do that again and again at every boot, sure, but that's no black magic...

Een ongeluk komt nooit alleen

Or, for my English readers' convenience: an accident never occurs alone.

Yesterday, my dad asked me to push our trailer into the back of our garden, through the gate that is there. That wouldn't be a problem, but I miscalculated a slight bit, and ran the trailer's tire against a sharp end sticking out of the gate. As a result, the tire was completely ruined and had to be replaced.

So, we fetched the reserve tire and started removing the wheel with the broken tire from the trailer. Unfortunately, that didn't seem to be very easy – the trailer had had its current wheels on it since ages, and apparently some bits of it had become quite rusty. As a result, we couldn't get it off.

We used oil to try and get rid of the rust. Didn't help. We took a hammer and would carefully hit the wheel. Didn't help. I took a wooden beam, put it against the back of the wheel under the trailer, and hit it with a sledgehammer. We quit doing that when the beam had splintered at both ends (after I turned it around) and the wheel hadn't even moved a millimeter yet.

Finally being out of sane options, we hooked the trailer up to the car and drive it around the sand field where it was situated until the wheel fell off. That worked, but the wheel hit the mudguard when it fell off, which in turn decided that it would like a different shape. So we couldn't fit the new wheel on anymore – the mudguard was in the way.

I tried to use a crowbar to move the mudguard back so that the wheel would fit, but that didn't work; its elasticity was too high, I couldn't get it to move the way I wanted it. When we finally did get it to move slightly, that was only because it was breaking off. Now, a mudguard that isn't firmly attached anymore is a dangerous thing, so we decided to completely remove it from the trailer. Dad fetched one of his tools which would do the job, but when he had just started, it suddenly started to produce smoke... its engine had broken down.

This is really silly. What started off as a silly 2-minute job ended up taking about an hour and a half from my day, and didn't accomplish anything besides a broken trailer, a splintered beam, and a broken tool.

Oh well.

Busy weekend

Last weekend was pretty busy.

As I reported previously, my good friend Kris is doing a little movie, and I'm his main actor. We did the third and fourth days of shooting this weekend, and it went well – even if it took longer than we planned. Everything involving me has been filmed now, except for a few shots that require other things to be filmed first.

Unfortunately, because the shooting took longer than expected, there was no time left to go view the new Star Wars movie as we had planned. Since I'm leaving for HEL next week already, it'll be a problem to still be able to go see it, I'm afraid...

Heat

It's hot over here. Very hot. So hot that my laptop switched off from overheating when I was just compiling a kernel. And my brother's box did the same thing while Enemy Territory was running. Needless to say, it's way too hot to be sitting outside. Plus, I don't think my skin could handle gracefully.

And the weather forecast told us that tomorrow it's going to be worse. Grmbl.

Heat sucks.

Apart from it making me uncomfortable outside and it making flowers produce stuff that makes me sneeze, it also isn't too healthy for computer systems.

The last week, three computers inside this house broke down. I suspect it's because of the heat. What am I supposed to do without decent systems? Get bored?

Grmbl.

One of the machines that isn't responding to its power switch right now is my laptop. I'm not entirely sure whether it's broken or whether it dislikes booting with no power in its battery (I forgot to switch it off when I last left it), but if it is broken, I'll probably have to go to Debconf without the thing. This means that if there is a God of geek gatherings, it must hate me — the last two times I went to one (FOSDEM 2004, FOSDEM 2005), my laptop was broken, too.

Sick and tired of all this.

I've got it plugged into a power outlet, and will go to bed soonishly. Here's for hoping it'll all magically work tomorrow morning.

No luck.

As I mentioned two days ago, my laptop doesn't boot anymore. I hoped it would after it had been recharged, but it doesn't appear to be the case. Darn.

I brought it to my neighbour/Apple salesman yesterday, who's taken it to work with him again. He knows I'd love to have it back by wednesday morning, and told me he'd try to get it done by then. Let's hope that's possible. In the mean time, I contacted some people to try and borrow a replacement laptop for the duration of DebConf, just in case. I guess we'll see what happens.

Packing for DebConf

I'm dressed like an idiot who's stuck in the '80s right now, because all my decent clothes are in the washing machine. I need a bigger suitcase, because I can't get everything I need in the largest one we have. I still need to get some stuff in a shop. My laptop seems to have broken its logic board somehow, so it won't be back in time.

On the plus side, the neighbour/apple salesman promised me he'd give me an iBook on loan which I could use for the next month or so. At least that issue seems solved.

On the ferry

I am writing this on the ferry Rostock-Hanko, which we took to get to DebConf. It is now a bit past 8 in the morning, meaning, I'll have to be bored for at least 8 more hours, if not more. It also means I got up early –at least to my standards. I'm bored, because there is an Internet connection here, but no free one, not one that I can connect to my laptop, and certainly not one that I can hijack using nstx or so. Also, Holger and p2 aren't awake yet (I wish I could sleep in a chair, but alas — and renting a cabinet with a real bed is much more expensive than what we did), so I'll probably have to keep to myself for a while. I already took a short tour of the ship (there isn't much to see anyway), so now I'll have to wait for 9 o'clock to get breakfast, and then try to spend the day doing something useful. At least this ship has working power outlets, so there's no risk of running out of battery power (which otherwise would be a real problem, given that the borrowed laptop's battery is close to being dead, and seems to be able to provide battery power for no more than 30 minutes to one hour or so).

Speaking of this laptop, I can hardly wait to get mine back. The keyboard is a bit broken: the 'k' and 'm' keys are loose, and the space bar doesn't work across its entire width anymore. Also, for some reason it mixes up the LSGT and TLDE keys, so I've had to swap those around in the xkb symbols map. And fix up some other things, of course, so that my keyboard is sane again (meaning, slightly different from the default one as shipped and intended). But of course those keyboard issues are nothing in the light of the much slower processor that is powering this laptop -- a G3 500 rather than my own G4 1333. Oh well; at least I've got something that I can use for debconf, and the alternatives that had been offered (p2's lombard-class powerbook G3 which is even slower and doesn't have a working touchpad, or Kris' Pentium 233) most certainly weren't any better.

Right. Let's check up on Holger and p2 again.

Arrived

We, that is, Holger Levsen, p2 and myself, have arrived at Riku's place near Helsinki, where we will spend the night. This isn't a moment too soon; I've been in transit for over 38 hours, having left at home at around 7:30, and we've arrived here around an hour ago, at 21:00 the next day.

It's been a nice day, but all I'm going to do right now is to eat, make sure offlineimap runs on this laptop, (haven't had the time to do that before I left, so it still needs to fetch all my mails, which is going to take a while over my 128kbit uplink...) reply to urgent mails (if any) and try to get some sleep.

See you tomorrow in HEL.