jd:/dev/blog - debian

Unexpected VARMon new release

jd — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:02:00 +0200

This has been 4 years since I released a new upstream release of VARMon, the DAC960 administration tool.

There was a bug first discovered in #401236. It has been fixed in Debian with an ugly fix, which did not work finally for a long time. Recently #491505 got opened too, which was the same as the previous one. But this time I got access to hardware, thanks to Christoph! And I finally fixed the bug. I've even be able to test the fixes I wrote years ago for all of the compilation warnings.

That's a shame that the problem was caused by dead code from the previous upstream, and that I did not realize that sooner. Kids, do not let dead debug code in your program at home.

So I've finally been able to release a new 1.2.1 version which maybe the last release for the next decade!

Save power, aka easy CPU frequency scaling

jd — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:32:00 +0200

Recently I came with the idea that my big computer is just useless. I know I was not using its entire CPU power, so I decided to take a look at CPU frequency scaling.

Last time I tried, it was a PITA, required something like a daemon, and just did not work. With recent hardware and/or kernels, it's just easy as Debian.

etch

Look at /proc/cpuinfo to determine your CPU and the cpufreq module. If it's a Pentium, you can try p4-clockmod, powernow-k7 for AMD, or acpi-cpufreq for both. Well, if none loads, let it go, it won't work unless you get newer hardware or maybe newer kernel.
Add this module in /etc/modules to get it loaded at boot time.
Run apt-get install cpufrequtils
Edit /etc/default/cpufrequtils to enable it at boot time, and specify the governor if you want. I usually use ondemande, which is just fine.
Run /etc/init.d/cpufrequtils start
Play with cpufreq-info and cpufreq-set as you wish.

lenny

Run apt-get install cpufrequtils
Edit /etc/default/cpufrequtils to enable it at boot time, and specify the governor if you want. I usually use ondemande, which is just fine.
Run /etc/init.d/loadcpufreq start
Run /etc/init.d/cpufrequtils start
Play with cpufreq-info and cpufreq-set as you wish.

On my box, the 3 GHz CPUs (Core 2 Duo) are running at 2 GHz (the lower value) at 99.13% of the time. That's almost a bit less power wasted.

xulrunner hacking

jd — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:11:00 +0200

I've discovered a tiny bug in Iceweasel yesterday, and I decided to fix it myself. So I'm proud to have opened bug #494694 against xulrunner with a patch!

That bring me to the tip of the day: if you are bored, I suggest you compile xulrunner and keep looking at the build log while it's building. There's so much gcc warnings that you'll get enthousiastic thinking:

« Argh, it'll fail… Oh no! That was just a bunch of warnings! Ahah this time it'll fail! Shit, just 764 warnings again in a row. Not so bad… ».

The nochange-log

jd — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:30:00 +0200

Saw in base-files changelog:

base-files (4.0.5) unstable; urgency=low
[…]
* It's still soon to change /etc/debian_version. Please be patient.

-- Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org>  Tue,  5 Aug 2008 18:06:06 +0200

Applause.

awesome 3 in experimental

jd — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:04:00 +0200

I've just uploaded awesome 3.0-rc1 to experimental. For people who can't wait, the git repository is on Alioth.

awesome 3 should stay in experimental until it gets fully released. I plan to rename current awesome 2.x package to awesome2 and get awesome 3 as the new default awesome package. So Debian will still provide awesome 2 for people who don't want to upgrade.

ATL1E support in 2.6.26-1

jd — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:59:00 +0200

Ben Armstrong opened an ITP for the ATL1E NIC driver, which is found on some Asus EeePC laptops. So, as suggested by Maximilian Attems, I provided a clean patch for this driver, made from a cherry-pick from the linux-netdev 2.6.27 tree. It has been commited into the 2.6.26-1 Debian kernel, which will be furnished with Lenny.

What's fun, is that in the mean time, I got a new computer at work. Wait, it's not fun yet. Because what I did not know is that it's made of an Asus P5Q motherboard which runs a NIC needing the ATL1E driver (and now you see it's fun).

So I've just upgraded to 2.6.26-1-amd64 and I'm glad that my own work is useful to me (and will be probably be to others as well).

Debian maintenance team are great

jd — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:52:00 +0200

A few months ago, I decided to move my libcgi-session-perl package to the pkg-perl project. This seemed the right thing to do since I just do not do Perl anymore, anyway.

And now that's the second time that I notice someone has uploaded a new upstream release in my back. WTF, this guy did my job!

That's awesome.

One step further for XCB into Debian

jd — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:11:00 +0200

I've take some time this morning to work on xcb-util packaging. I've mainly urge that work because Sebastian Dröge, the sweet cairo maintainer, agreed to enable the cairo XCB backend (#474353), which requires xcb-util.

The first upload I've made was built from the latest upstream release which is old (i.e. more than one year old). So I've put a git repository in place this morning and packaged the latest git upstream version, with some good patches from Arnaud (upstream+patches branch), that the upstream XCB developers are still reviewing since several weeks: that is the cost to pay for good code quality؟

Thanks to Sebastian, the new xcb-util targeted for unstable was just arrived in incoming that he already uploaded a new version of the Debian cairo package with XCB backend enabled.

Well, that's a very good day for me since it means that building awesome 3 is no more a PITA (hi MadCoder!) since every dependency is available in the Debian archive.

Updating my .plan

jd — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:46:00 +0200

I've been on holidays for one week now, breaking my usual workflow. Well, that allowed me to rest and to think about what I'd like to do and things I need to handle during next weeks.

The urgent things this next days will be my primary server replacement. It is currently dying, and I already had to change its power supply twice in a month. Unfortunately, I'm now at a point where I do not have any spare piece so if things go wrong again, I'm screwed. I need to collect some money and buy a new server, or maybe get a server if someone have an old or spare one to give me, I do not know yet.

On the awesome front, I'm about to release awesome 2.3, which will be the final minor release of the major branch 2. This will lead me to work on awesome 3 at a slower rate and a cooler pace.

Then, the thing I do not have to hurry for is awesome 3. There's no big problems in awesome 2, and the xcb-util stuff are not stabilized yet. After my gentle yelling on XCB mailing list, it seems that things will move but will slowly. So I do have time to make things right and do what I want on that branch, making bugfix release on awesome 2 if needed. You can read more about futur on my last post about awesome.

All this should give me some more spare time to work on the upcoming Debian release, lenny, which I'd like to work on. Two years ago (my god, time flies), we've done good work with the french cabal squashing critical bugs and I'd like to go back on this and squash asses again.

Back from holidays

jd — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 08:10:00 +0100

After 10 days of nice holidays, I'm back. I was totally offline, so I had to read some hundred of mails first, which is done now.

For a good restart, I've fixed a bunch of bugs in awesome and released 2.2-rc2 version. I've also migrated apt-build repository on Alioth from Subversion to git. I've uploaded a new version of this one with some patches, and a also put in the archive a new version of the mp32ogg package.

Next step will be to move my packages repositories which are in my global home Subversion repository, to my own git repositories on Alioth.

Testing out GRUB 2

jd — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 08:13:00 +0100

After reading Jordi post about GRUB 2, I decided to give it a try on my EeePC.

I've just installed the grub-pc package, answered the questions, and that was it. I tested it with the chainload method from GRUB legacy, and it worked. I just had to rerun grub-install to replace the legacy with the new one. And I've a nice Debian background in the menu now!

What seems amazing is that GRUB now see my... LVM logical volumes! So this seems to be really cool, because this means no more /boot-without-lvm-ext3-formatted partitions because my-boot-loader-sucks-a-bit.

Holidays and projects

jd — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 11:53:00 +0100

Long story short: I'm busy.

These days are quite busy. I'm working (you know, I need to eat so I've a job), to the point that I have many vacation days to take. So I'll be in holidays and offline from friday for 10 days.

I'm still working on awesome developement. Code base is quite good now, so I don't do 30 commits/day anymore, and update are less frequent. It's very nice that the users base is increasing every day, without polluting the mailing list and the BTS with bug reports and request for documentation. That means we at least achieve to do a not-so-bad code with a not-so-bad documentation. The feature requests list is still a bit long, but I think it will decrease in the next weeks.

On a human side, that's the biggest project I ever managed and it's very pleasant to have so many users and contributors.

I've some more project I'd like to work too. I plan to write a small git stats generator in Python when I'll have some more spare time. I'd also like to do some developement work around LDAP and Python for my servers, but I did not find the courage to do it neither the good library to handle LDAP object correctly (a DB_Object way would be good).

I'm always following Debian developement with one eye, so I'm not totally out. I really hope I could to some bug squashing like I did with several Debian buddies 2 years ago for the etch release.

Stay tuned.

New laptop: EeePC!

jd — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:56:00 +0100

This morning, the snail mail brought me a new toy! A brand new EeePC!

It's a very very nice device. I did not test the Xandros system more than 5 minutes, but it looks fine for dummy users. I've plugged an USB key into it, booted on the Debian installer (provided on the Debian wiki) and installed it in a few minutes.

The hardest part was adding wifi support, since I needed to grab madwifi svn version, added a patch, and compiled it. It was not so hard after all, just don't expect to use Debian packages for now.

It even boot in less than one minute! The hardest part is to type on a such tiny keyboard.

Plectrum as reference size

rebuildd demo

jd — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 22:36:00 +0100

I've set up a quick rebuildd demo. It may allow you to rebuild one of your package on etch/lenny/sid and for amd64/i386 as you wish. You will get build log by email.

I've just wrote the PHP page in 2 hours. I just hate Web interfaces and PHP is crap, seriously. For the record, I've tried to use DataGrid, and after having lost 1h to get it work with no PHP/PEAR error printed or available, I managed to have it working with a big pear upgrade-all. OMFG.

rebuildd 0.3.0 released

jd — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 15:06:00 +0100

Everything seems to work, so just releasing it. I think it's becoming an amazing tool to do archive rebuild.

It just misses a good Web interface.

Testing out rebuildd 0.3.0

jd — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 10:04:00 +0100

awesome beiing in rc state, that leaves me a small amount of spare time. I decided to spend it on rebuildd. I had started the 0.3.0 version back in August, but never touched it again until now.

I was afraid because I did not remember in which state I left the code repository. And, good surprise, the code was in a quite good shape!

I just implemented and fixed some stuff that were reported on the BTS, and then, I only had to test it out.

For that I used the servers kindly provided by TuxFamily.org:

whisky: 6 x Pentium III @ 700 MHz/L2 1 MB + 1.7 GB RAM
octave: 8 x Pentium III @ 500 MHz/L2 2 MO + 2 GB RAM

I stored the MySQL database on whisky. filled it with rebuildd-job add-quinn-diff (new feature in 0.3.0) and then started rebuildd on each node. And then I saw the 2 hosts starting to grab, lock jobs, build packages on each side. Wonderful. That just works.

rebuildd-job stats says that 20 % of the archive is now built in less than 24h, seems fast, cool.

Bad point is that I'm building and trashing logs into /dev/null because I've no QA idea to implement right now.

awesome 2.0-rc1

jd — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 22:47:00 +0100

awesome 2.0-rc1 released and waiting in Debian NEW queue.

Time < work

jd — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:45:00 +0100

It's official: I'm beginning to be a bit overloaded.

Luk gently asked me about my status in the (stable) release management team. That just made a bit more guilty not doing that I'd like to do.

Current TODO list involves:

release awesome 2.0-rc1 and update website and documentation for it;
work on rebuildd, finish and polish 0.3 version;
run a full rebuild of the Debian archive to test rebuldd 0.3, do some QA work;
update mod_defensible to fix problem with udns timeout;
work on Debian release management, at least rewrite lost script for (old-)proposed-updates which were on ries'
work on Debian Xen;
handle a lot of waiting task on my network/servers.

Now, the thing that will help: I'm house moving this week-end with no (real) Internet connection yet. I only managed to establish a VPN over port 53/udp on a hotspot from a pub near my new apartment with 25-30 KB/s bandwidth, which is better than nothing actually.

awesome* is asking me a lot of time right now, and since it's my last launched project, I am motivated and have a lot of idea, so I like to hack on him right now. I think I will have to postpone future release to not forget other things.

I'm going to see what happens by the end of the year and if I'm able to catch up with everything. Otherwise I might need to drop some things…

Life is too short.

Ubuntu: not contributing to Debian, and even doing bad work

jd — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 20:34:00 +0200

Googling around using the rebuildd keyword to find if people were talking about it, I found that patch from Ubuntu.

This patch is used to ship rebuildd Debian package in Ubuntu.

Wahou. First surprise! So, Ubuntu is fixing bugs and not telling me. I though that people saying "Ubuntu does not contribute back to Debian!" were exaggerating. Seems I was wrong.

Nevermind: I take the patch. I read the patch. I apply the pat… oh wait: the fix is wrong.

lol.

Random news

jd — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 20:18:00 +0200

Wouhou, yesterday was quite a productive day.

First, I've released mod_defensible 1.4 which is just one line different from 1.3 but fix a huge bug (RC in Debian) with udns 0.0.9. Already uploaded to sid.

Second, I've updated greylistd in Debian and I've set myself as maintainer after 5 NMU in something like 1 year.

Then, I've pushed some updates to awesome. I may release 1.2 in the week, since it seems bug free and has some useful new features. We're now quite close to Xmonad functionalities as far as I can tell.

And the beat goes on…