CF adventures
I've been playing with my ColdFire board the last few days. The initial problem of not being able to boot the kernel with useful output has been fixed thanks to one helpful post on a ColdFire-related mailinglist, and it now happily boots. I'm only doing NFS root for the time being, but that will change as soon as I get a decent powersupply to hook up to that thing, so that I can actually use the SCSI controller that I have (which seems to require more than the 5V barrel-connected powersupply that came with it and that I now use, can handle).
Anyway
One of the initial things I'm trying to do (after compiling myself a full and reasonable system, rather than the default busybox-based one) is to get the modified binutils up and running. Since I'm not sure the version I'm using will properly cross-compile (and since I don't actually care about cross-compiling, either), I've started a native compilation. I was sure that'd work at least to some degree, even if it'd take a (fair) bit longer than cross-compiling.
One of the first things that I notice is that it doesn't work. Apparently, the compiler shipped by Freescale doesn't produce working binaries. Every binary that I try to run gives a bus error on startup. Investigating with gdb shows it does so in the PLT section of the ELF binary.
This looks so extremely close to #327780 that it isn't funny. Guess I'll know what to do for the time being.
DFSG vs GFDL
One of the things that has kept Debian in heated discussion over the
last few years is the question whether the GFDL, or the GNU Free Documentation License, is free
according to Debian's own DFSG.
We've had three votes on the subject, with
the final one decisively saying it's conditionally free
.
Or so I thought. Yesterday, Josselin Mouette proposed another GR on the subject, since he believes there's a conflict between GR 2006 001 and the current text of the DFSG.
Sigh.
At least he isn't trying to reverse the effect GR 2006 001. But still; no, the GR does not conflict the text of the DFSG. I used to think otherwise, but got swayed by the discussions on -vote that occurred prior to GR 2006 001, especially (strangely) the one that happened as a result of Anton Zinoviev's amendment, which ended up as choice #3 on the ballot.
At the the time, I was supportive of the original proposal to throw out all GFDL-licensed documents, even though I disliked doing so (for obvious reasons); but I felt that the arguments about the DRM clause did hold.
This was wrong, and it took me an insult to see it. Quoting Anton, myself, and Craig Sanders:
only by nutcases with an agenda. normal people (including lawyers and judges) wouldn't have such an insane and insupportable interpretation. that's because normal people rely on facts. and evidence. they don't just make up whatever crap they need to suit their argument.This clause disallows the distribution or storage of copies on DRM-protected media only if a result of that action will be that the reading or further copying of the copies is obstructed or controlled. It is not supposed to refer [to] the use of encryption or file access control on your own copy.No; however, as written it can be interpreted as such.
Craig's way of saying things did not immediately have the intended effect; and had I not grown tired of the discussion, I probably would've missed it. But the fact that I stopped following the discussion gave me some time to think about it, and as such, Craig's argument had a chance to sink in. When I was finally swayed, I failed to attribute it to Craig, however, instead thinking it was an argument by Anton that did it.
The point is this: the mere fact that you're able to construct an interpretation of a license which is logically sound and complies with everything, does not mean that it is a sane interpretation. Lawyers and judges, strange people though they might be according to some jokes, are still people; human beings. If you come up with an interpretation that nobody in court came up with on the first reading of a given text, then chances are rather high nobody will follow you.
That's what really matters: whether something you claim will hold in
court. Not whether something you claim holds up to your own
argumentation. And yes, claiming that doing chmod -r
, or storing
something on an encrypted filesystem is somehow restricting
distribution
, seems a little far-fetched. After all, when I'm
storing something on my own hard disk, or even in the privacy of my
home-directory on a large shared fileserver, I'm not engaging in a
distribution
of any kind.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 (August 2003) [wn]:
distribution
n 1: (statistics) an arrangement of values of a variable showing
their observed or theoretical frequency of occurrence
[syn: {statistical distribution}]
2: the spatial property of being scattered about over an area
or volume [syn: {dispersion}] [ant: {concentration}]
3: the act of distributing or spreading or apportioning
4: the commercial activity of transporting and selling goods
from a producer to a consumer
Definition 3 and 4 seem to require an active action by the
originating person; when someone copies a file from your $HOME, you
didn't distribute the file to them; they took it from you. In our
culture of sharing is good, you should share!
, I missed it; but a
court would probably see copying without asking for permission
more as stealing
, rather than distributing
.
After all that, the arguments about the DRM clause being too broad
seemed a bit weak to me; and given that the FSF had already
agreed on it being a bug which needed to be fixed, as they had for the
other arguments against the GFDL (apart from the Invariant sections,
which are not being discussed here), made me decide that the big
giant insane problems
with the GFDL are not so much of a problem as
most people seem to claim.
Crypto law in Belgium.
I've always thought that I live in a sane country regarding crypto law—or, at least, one not as insane as the US. Apparently I was a bit too optimistic.
According to this page, or more specifically, the Belgium-specific bits, you need a special license to be allowed to export cryptography outside of the Benelux. This is in relation to the Wassenaar Arrangement, an international agreement on cryptography laws which allows "public-domain" software, but not necessarily other types of software. If I can assume that the term "public domain" here really refers to software of which the source is freely available, then there is no issue; otherwise, I may be doing something illegal.
I guess I'll have to investigate that.
Moreover, and this is really a surprise to me, law enforcement officials in Beligum can, after an order of an investigation judge, order me to "make accessible [...] data in the form ordered by the judge", which might involve decryption; or they can also order someone whom they reasonably suspect to have special knowledge of encryption services to give information on "how to get the data at stake in intelligible form"—how to break the algorithm, if that can be done.
Failure to comply with this might get me between 6 months and a year of imprisonment and/or a fine between 26 and 20 000 BEF (1EUR = 40.3399 BEF)
I had no clue.
Crypto law, take two
- Yes, I had read their FAQ, and had seen that the controls are
implemented by each state themselves. That's why I concluded my comment
on that bit by
will have to investigate this
- Yes, they can force you to decrypt your own data. Read Art. 88quater, §2, carefully.
DPL election finished.
Well, the electorate made its decision; aj won. It's not a secret that aj wasn't my first choice, and so I'm a slight bit unhappy about the result—but that, of course, won't keep me from congratulating aj with his new position. My reservations aside, I'm sure aj's enthousiasm and passion for the project will ensure he'll do great job as DPL.
That being said, I can't help but notice that the result was a very close one, this year. As Adam Borowski noted on the debian-devel mailinglist, Steve had higher margins in every choice-to-choice race in the vote, except that 6 (count them: six) people voted aj above Steve. So, here's an applaus for Steve, too, for a result well earned.
X.Org 7
If you're using Debian unstable on powerpc and haven't done your update today yet, might I suggest you hold off on that for a few days?
apr 13 09:14:28 <Yoe> xorg 7 also seriuosly messed up fonts
apr 13 09:14:48 <Yoe> "display" from imagemagick doesn't work anymore, and neither does rxvt-unicode
apr 13 09:15:02 <Yoe> so how am I supposed to do *anything* useful, now? ;)
apr 13 09:15:04 <simonrvn> i've been using 7 from experimental, so i had to change my fontpath in xorg.conf
apr 13 09:15:10 <simonrvn> was
apr 13 09:15:19 <Yoe> oh?
apr 13 09:15:36 <simonrvn> /usr/share/fonts/X11
apr 13 09:15:39 <Yoe> is that documented somewhere?
apr 13 09:15:42 <Yoe> ah
apr 13 09:15:55 <simonrvn> might be, not sure
apr 13 09:16:16 <Yoe> hmm
apr 13 09:16:16 <simonrvn> though don't remove the old ones, add those, since some of the packages still use the old path
apr 13 09:16:26 <Yoe> well, not here, aparently
apr 13 09:16:36 <Yoe> my FontPaths all point to /usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc,
apr 13 09:16:37 <simonrvn> if it is, either BTS or one of the READMEs
apr 13 09:16:44 <Yoe> s/misc//
apr 13 09:17:06 <Yoe> and /usr/lib/X11/fonts is a symlink to '../../share/fonts/X11'
apr 13 09:17:11 <Yoe> which does not exist.
apr 13 09:17:27 <ejka> Yoe: dpkg -l xfonts-base
apr 13 09:17:41 <Yoe> that's installed
apr 13 09:17:53 <Yoe> ... but still the 6.9.0 version
apr 13 09:17:53 <ejka> Yoe: version
apr 13 09:18:04 <simonrvn> l /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.1K 2006-04-11 00:32 charB08.pcf.gz ....
apr 13 09:18:41 <Yoe> ah
apr 13 09:18:51 <Yoe> xfonts-base depends on xfonts-utils, which isn't available (yet)
apr 13 09:18:59 <Yoe> so I s'ppose I'll need to wait another day
apr 13 09:19:02 <Yoe> (powerpc here)
apr 13 09:20:25 <ejka> Yoe: for now you can add fontpaths /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/{misc,...}
apr 13 09:20:49 <simonrvn> xfonts-utils *just came in to ppc today (sid)
apr 13 09:20:55 <simonrvn> *just*
apr 13 09:21:10 --> gismo (i=luca@129.194.56.110) has joined #debian-devel
apr 13 09:21:37 <Yoe> right
apr 13 09:21:42 <Yoe> brb, restart X server
apr 13 09:21:43 Tcl interface unloaded
apr 13 09:21:43 Python interface unloaded
**** LOGGEN GESTOPT OM Thu Apr 13 09:21:43 2006
Hah.
wouter@country:~$ startx
bash: startx: command not found
wouter@country:~$ X
X: cannot stat /etc/X11/X (No such file or directory), aborting.
wouter@country:~$ su -
Password:
country:~# apt-get install xserver-xorg
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that
the package is simply not installable and a bug report against
that package should be filed.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
xserver-xorg: Depends: xserver-xorg-core but it is not installable
Depends: xserver-xorg-video-all but it is not going to be installed or
xserver-xorg-video but it is not installable
Depends: xserver-xorg-input-all but it is not going to be installed or
xserver-xorg-input but it is not installable
E: Broken packages
country:~# apt-get install xserver-xorg-core
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Package xserver-xorg-core is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package xserver-xorg-core has no installation candidate
country:~# apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-core
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
E: Build-Depends dependency for xserver-xorg-core cannot be satisfied because no available versions of package libxmuu-dev can satisfy version requirements
Believe me, it's painful to have no X server available.
Update: okay, by getting packages from experimental I've been able to get myself a somewhat working X again. Except that xkb doesn't load my modified keymap, which is horrible, and setxkbmap refuses to do anything when I say "setxkbmap wouter" and, on top of that, quits by segfault for good measure. I'm hoping that's fixed in the version that's been uploaded to unstable, but I can't check that—at the time of writing,buildd.debian.org doesn't even have a log file for some of the xorg stuff yet. Though some parts are in the building state at this very moment...
Digital Camera
I bought myself a digital camera today.
It's probably the most low-end camera you could imagine, approximately the size of the insert-delete-home-end-pgup-pgdown key block on an average keyboard. Well, slightly larger.
Obviously the quality isn't very good. In fact, I suspect that many cell phone cameras are of better quality (I wouldn't know, I don't have a cell phone with camera).
So why did I buy this thing? Because of its price, which is so low that it's laughable. And, well, because of the size—it can be stashed away nicely.
Only I just found out that the battery life isn't very good. I had connected it to my laptop for a bit more than an hour, and now it doesn't power up anymore unless it is connected. According to the manual, it should not use the battery while it's connected to a USB port, but I guess they're wrong.
Something else that isn't very good is the English translation they've been doing. Mooha.
Thank you for purchasing this digital camera. It not only can take photos but also has the built-in camera functions. This camera is equipped with a 64Mbit built-in SDRAM; if you want the photos in the camera to be download into the computer ,you are only required to connect the USB cable; and if you want to use the built-in PC camera functions, you can hold the video conference via the Internet to have a face-to-face online chat with others.
... is exactly what the back-cover of the wrapper contained. With no typos. No, not with typos in spaces and commas either.
I do have one grunt with this thing, and that is that the 'viewfinder' (sic) is totally useless; if I want to take a picture with the thing, I have to point the camera towards the general area of my subject, cross my fingers, and hope for the best. But, well. It works, and while the pictures aren't very good, they're not that bad, either. I guess that's all I could ask for 14.40 euros.
OpenBSD sucks!
Last FOSDEM, I snatched one of the free OpenBSD 3.7 CD-ROMs with me. Not that I was planning to switch to OpenBSD or anything; but I have this spare 10G partition on my laptop that I use to play with all the time. There's never anything on that partition that is insanely important; and usually I change it to something else after a few months.
It had been containing MacOS for a fair number of months, since there was an issue with my kernel that made changing my screen brightness impossible for some reason; but that has been fixed now. I wouldn't know what the problem was, but switching from my own-built kernel.org kernels to the Debian-precompiled kernel fixed it. Heh.
As it happened, this weekend I was looking for something in my backpack, and stumbled upon that OpenBSD installation set again, which I'd completely forgotten about. Since I'd grown tired of MacOS by now, I thought about installing OpenBSD on the play partition.
Obviously, their installer is a slight bit more spartanic than the Debian installer. Heck, they're a BSD system.
One of the first questions was whether I wanted to use an OpenBSD-specific partition table or an HFS-based one. Since Linux uses the latter, and I didn't want to lose the Linux partition, I chose HFS. Next, it threw me into a partitioner, telling me that I needed to end up with (at least) one partition that had 'OpenBSD' as its type and name. So I made sure to do it that way, which took me a few tries to get it right. After that, I had to create a BSD-style "disklabel". I happen to think those things are pretty crazy, but, well; it's how the BSD systems work. First, I made a 4.3BSD slice for my data (slice a), and next a swap slice (slice b) that was 10% of the size of the partition that I'd created for OpenBSD.
Or so I thought.
The problem was that none of the above steps used gigabytes, megabytes, or even kilobytes, as its unit; instead, I had to create partitions and slices in blocks. Not that I don't know what a block is, but it's not as easy to spot issues that way.
After I'd written the new partitions and slices, and started to format the a slice, suddenly the system decided to show me the size of the thing it was formatting after all. I didn't notice it immediately. But then it dawned on me...
It was formatting my entire hard disk. That's right, even though I had clearly and explained that it shouldn't touch anything besides these 10 gigabytes that I set aside for the thing, it still decided to go on and format everything. Aaargh!
I quickly switched the thing off, and rebooted it to check the damage. Of course, I didn't reboot it by using the system that I'd just corrupted; that would only make matters worse. However, since the Linux partition is near the end of the disk, it could just as well have been so that there was nothing wrong. Unfortunately, that was not the case; my ext3 partition had been corrupted. Luckily, not entirely; I've been able to rsync most of my data to another system, including the list of packages and most of the files in my home directory.
But the OpenBSD disk is sooo toast. No, really.
Rood vierkantje
27 seconden. Of: waarom flash ook niet alles is.
Pbbuttonsd
PMU-based laptops can use either pmud (which works, but doesn't have a lot of features—and which, occasionally, is maintained by fellow m68k porter Michael Schmitz) or pbbuttonsd, (which is a lot better) for their power management. Pbbuttonsd also has support for doing stuff with the hotkeys on the apple keyboard, like changing the screen brightness, the sound volume, or going to sleep (if your laptop supports it) after one uses the power button.
In addition, pbbuttonsd will reduce the screen brightness if the laptop is running on battery power and hasn't been used for a while.
This is cool.
Unfortunately, it also does it if I'm using an external USB mouse to browse the web and don't touch my keyboard or touchpad for a while.
This is not so cool.
Hmm.
You know all these "FW: Re: FW: Doorst.:" emails your mother seems to be sending you all the time?
At least my mother does. Some of such emails consist merely of a "Warning, there's a new virus out there!", but luckily mom's stopped sending me such mails, after I explained to her how pointless and (especially) incorrect such emails are.
The next stadium was one of those "Please help, cancer kid! Forward this email, please!" which she's now stopped doing, too.
She's even passed the stadium in which she sends jokes, now, and gone towards trivia; today, I got this in my mailbox:
On thursday, may 4th, at two minutes past 1 AM in the morning, the time and date will be the following:
01:02:03 04-05-06
This will never happen again!!!
She's got a point. Of course, this only applies if you live in a place where the time is usually stated in DMY order. But still, that's kinda funny.
But I'm not going to forward it to anyone.
Update: 5.
('course I knew people would react. I just wanted to know how many people would react, given that I'd only be AFK for four hours)
X keymap working again.
As I blogged before, I had issues with my X keymap since the update to X11R7. It took me a while to figure out (mainly because I didn't want to work on this without a second computer in the neighbourhood, since losing the functionality of a keyboard is quite... interesting if you can't ssh in and fix it), but eventually I found out:
X (technically xkbcomp) was looking for my keymap in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/wouter, rather than /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/macintosh_vndr/wouter, as I would expect.
So it fell back to the "use the console keymap", for which I never spent the effort of trying to figure out what the correct setting was. As a result, I didn't have any way to enter characters such as [{}]\|€ etc... which is painful.
EMILE: tomorrow
Today I 'ave mostly been eating...
EMILE. Or my IIci, pick one. I came very close.
Anyway. It's been almost a year since the first WNPP bug about EMILE was filed, but today I finished the work. The main reason that I haven't uploaded it earlier is that my previous attempts at building a working package did not succeed; the package got built, but did not work.
Today's package, however, is one that finally works on my IIci. Hence, I think the time to upload has come. Except that lintian isn't too happy about it yet, but that's being fixed now.
Well, now... it takes a few hours to build the package on a IIci. I could probably do it 'somewhere else', but then I need to compile a new crosscompiler first. Which is going to take too long to my taste. I could probably also pick one of my faster m68k machines (the IIci really is the slowest one I have), but they're all busy doing other stuff right now. That is, except for the Quadra 700, but that one is still at home, shut down, and with a hard disk that I rendered unbootable on a previous EMILE attempt. I guess now that it boots with EMILE, I'll take the MacOS disk out of barok (the IIci), and take it home to fix the Quadra 700. Some time soon.
Anyway, EMILE will be uploaded into NEW once the build is complete; I'll announce here when it's ready. This should be tomorrow by the latest. In the mean time, I'll let you know that I created a wiki page to list the hardware that EMILE does support. That's certainly not all of them, but I guess we'll see.
Update: here for the impatient, but it's also been uploaded to incoming.d.o—where it awaits NEW processing.
Google maps.
Looks like Google Maps finally reached civilization. Or is it the other way around? They still don't have high-resolution photos of my house yet, and you can't search for an address yet either; but at least I can point people that yes, that's where I live.
Oh, and TeleAtlas? You guys are dead wrong. The bit of asphalt between the Waterstraat, the Jos Craeybexlaan, Den Geer, the Oostergeest, the Bremboslei, and the middle part of the Bund isn't called 'Bund'. It's part of the parochial domain of the local parish called 'Bunt'. They're spelled differently, owing to a disagreement between the religious and city governments ages ago that you don't want to know about. But in any case, the church isn't on the Bund; the bit of asphalt doesn't have a name, and the official address of the church is "Waterstraat 16". Conveniently, the local area is called 'Bunt', too.
Oh well. I'll forgive you for that little mistake—you're not the first to get this wrong, and probably not the last, either.
GCC 4.1
The m68k port has been having issues with GCC 4.0 since its inclusion in the archive. Although many of the bugs that spawned from that update have since been fixed, there are still a lot of them; I suspect the high number of GCC 4.0 ICEs is the main reason the m68k port still hasn't made it back as a release candidate architecture.
Many of the issues with GCC 4.0 seem fixed in GCC 4.1. The most recent example is QT4, which did not build with G++ 4.0, but did build with G++ 4.1. Another particularly problematic example is some KDE-related thing (the name of which I can't remember offhand) that didn't build with GCC 4.0 due to an ICE, and didn't build with GCC 3.4 either, due to a different ICE.
However, it's hard to say for sure whether GCC4.1 really is an improvement if you haven't tried using it on an autobuilder. For that reason, I just installed gcc 4.1 in the buildd chroots on jazz and quickstep, the experimental autobuilders, and made them the default compilers.
Hopefully that'll work better than GCC 4.0.
Flooding Planet Debian.
We've all done it from time to time. Well, at least some of us have:
Break our blog, so that unique names in the RSS feed are no longer unique. Which would then result in flooding the planet. There's nothing wrong with that; RSS isn't mail, and isn't flawless. In fact, we should be proud of it. I know I am.
Though only because I didn't do it quite that often
MSNbot
Serge is pondering whether to block MSNbot, since it's wasting his bandwidth like hell. I can only say, Serge, Join the club. I did that ages ago.