Re: [RFC] locking down rsyslog.service

[Sam Morris]

On 10/10/2023 19:22, Michael Biebl wrote:

I intend to lock down rsyslog.service in Debian in one of the next
uploads using the following systemd directives


Have you considered NoNewPrivileges=yes?

This is turned in implicitly by some of the other options (e.g,. 
PrivateDevices=yes) but only if running without CAP_SYS_ADMIN, so for it 
to be effective you'd have to set it explicitly.


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Re: Naming of network devices - how to improve it in buster

[Sam Morris]

On Sat, 15 Jul 2017 22:44:46 +1000, Russell Stuart wrote:

> On Sat, 2017-07-15 at 07:46 +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
>> Doesn't something like:
>> 
>> [Unit]
>> Description=My hook for foo.link After=foo.link BindsTo=foo.link
>> 
>> [Service]
>> Type=oneshot ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/whatever RemainAfterExit=yes
>> 
>> [Install]
>> WantedBy=multi-user.target
>> 
>> work to hook into when a link unit is activated?
>> 
>> (Or just a Wants and Before in the foo.link unit)
> 
> When I discovered .link and .network files the first thing I looked up
> in the doco was whether that sort of thing was possible.  I decided it
> wasn't and wrote it off as useless for me.
> 
> Now you've made me check for real.  After setting up the unit files you
> suggested I get this message in journalctl:
> 
>   Failed to add dependency on foo.link, ignoring: Invalid argument

You'd have to use BindsTo=sys-subsystem-net-devices-blah.device. But 
BindsTo= and device units are a bit fiddly, see <https://github.com/
systemd/systemd/issues/4413>.

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Re: use long keyid-format in gpg.conf (Re: Key collisions in the wild

[Sam Morris]

On Wed, 10 Aug 2016 10:26:09 +, Holger Levsen wrote:

> Hi Samuel,
> 
> On Wed, Aug 10, 2016 at 12:47:43AM +0200, Samuel Thibault wrote:
>> As a late follow-up of the gpg key collision thread from debian-private
>> (but posted on debian-devel, there is nothing private here, I prefer to
>> see this information publicized actually):
>> 
>> € gpg --search-key samuel.thiba...@gnu.org
>> ...
>> (1) Samuel Thibault 
>> 4096 bit RSA key 7D069EE6, created: 2014-06-16
>> (2) Samuel Thibault 
>> 4096 bit RSA key 7D069EE6, created: 2010-09-14
>> 
>> So somebody *does* try to fake my gpg key too...
>> 
>> For the reminder,
>> https://gwolf.org/node/4070
> 
> I'm somewhat surprised by this mail… or rather by you appearantly
> knowing about the issue but still you seem to not have acted as advised,
> so let me repeat: everybody, please put "keyid-format long" into your
> ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf!
> 
> then, the output will look like this:
> 
> $ grep keyid-format .gnupg/gpg.conf 
> keyid-format long
> $ gpg --search-key samuel.thiba...@gnu.org
> ...
> (1) Samuel Thibault 
>   4096 bit RSA key E2992EA47D069EE6, created: 2014-06-16
> (2) Samuel Thibault 
> Samuel Thibault 
> Samuel Thibault 
> Samuel Thibault 
> Samuel Thibault 
>   4096 bit RSA key D0178C767D069EE6, created: 2010-09-14
> 
> 
> voila.

FYI, --search-key looks like this by default in 2.1. And when listing 
keys and in other operations, the output is even more verbose:

$ gpg2 -k sam@robots
pub   rsa4096 2014-04-08 [SC] [expires: 2019-04-07]
  CA1ACA69A83A892B1855D20B42025CDA27B9
uid   [ultimate] Sam Morris 
sub   rsa4096 2014-04-08 [E] [expires: 2019-04-07]

pub   dsa1024 2003-12-01 [SC] [expired: 2014-11-21]
  3412EA181277354B991BC869B2197FDB5EA01078
uid   [ expired] Sam Morris 

IMO this should be made consistent and the full fingerprint should be 
used for --search-key as it is with other operations, by default.

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Re: Bug#808414: ITP: ms-sys -- Program for writing Microsoft compatible boot records

[Sam Morris]

On Sun, 20 Dec 2015 00:05:38 +0100, Andrew Shadura wrote:
> On 19 December 2015 at 22:25, Lucas Castro 
> wrote:
>> * Package name: ms-sys
>>   Version : 0.0.28
>>   Upstream Author : Henrik Carlqvist 
>> 
>> * URL : http://ms-sys.sourceforge.net/
>> * License : GPL-2+
>>   Programming Lang: C
>>   Description : Program for writing Microsoft
>> compatible boot records
>>
>> The program does the same as Microsoft "fdisk /mbr" to a hard disk
>>  or "sys d:" to a floppy or FAT partition except that it does not copy
>>  any system files, only the boot record is written.
>>
>> It's usual in day-to-day of sysadmin the OS installation,
>> and with this package become easier to write boot record for MS OSes on
>> flashs and so create MS OS bootable flash.
>> I'll maintain this package by myself.
> 
> I'm quite certain this software can't enter Debian main, and I'm unsure
> about non-free, as in includes dumps of boot records apparently
> copyrighted by Microsoft, and even if there wasn't this they don't come
> with the complete source code.

That reminds me... I wonder if anyone has looked into the legal status of
boot_array from ntfs-3g?

https://sources.debian.net/src/ntfs-3g/1:2015.3.14AR.1-1/ntfsprogs/boot.c/

The comment implies that it's a copy of the "$Boot" file that comprises
the first 8192 bytes of an NTFS filesystem. It contains the code that
loads and executes BOOTMGR as part of the Windows startup process.

The Git history of the file tellingly has an entry "mkntfs: Use Vista
$Boot rather than XP one".

http://sourceforge.net/p/ntfs-3g/ntfs-3g/ci/5efc87cce89e46b73af5467da21a527fcc0f5043/log/?path=/ntfsprogs/boot.c

If boot_array isn't an independent implementation (doubtful IMO due to
the comments & the lack of real source code) then it too contains
proprietary code taken from Windows.

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Re: Putting default config files in /usr [was; (newbie) Disruptive LIRC package update.]

[Sam Morris]

On Wed, 11 Nov 2015 11:04:01 +0100, Alec Leamas wrote:


> BTW, note that the /etc/systemd/system local overrides don't need to be
> complete files, just the things locally changed. systemd merges the /lib
> and /etc files to the actual unit.

To expand on Marc's example, let's say /lib/systemd/system/foo.service 
contains:

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/foo

And /etc/systemd/system/foo.service.d/custom-option.conf contains:

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/foo --custom-option

Later on, /lib/systemd/system/foo.service is updated to contain:

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/foo --disable-unauthenticated-remote-admin-feature

The user will only notice this change and copy it into their own local 
override if they use apt-listchanges, or periodically run systemd-delta.

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Re: PulseAudio

[Sam Morris]

On Thu, 18 Jul 2013 09:14:56 +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:

>>>> How do I do that with just plain Alsa without using a text editor?
>>>
>>> In VLC:
>>>
>>> ctrl-p, go to the audio tab, and select the correct device in the
>>> "output" frame.
>>>
>>> That's not VLC-specific, FWIW; most applications that can do alsa
>>> output have a way to select the output device. There are exceptions,
>>> of course,
>>> but those applications are either immature or buggy.
>> 
>> Which means there is no canonical way to do it, and, like you said not
>> every application supports such an option.
> 
> I also called those exceptions "either immature or buggy". They're far
> and few between.

I have yet to see a web browser that allows you to change which audio 
device it uses. And even if there was such a browser, Flash wouldn't pay 
any attention to its settings.

>> Do I really elaborate why a central control panel to configure that is
>> the superior solution instead of having to figure out for each and
>> every application how to do it?
>>
> Again, there's no reason why such a control panel can't be a simple
> frontend to an asoundrc file.

I doubt any alsa client watches the .asoundrc file so that it can 
automatically reconfigure itself whenever the file is rewritten (without 
interrupting audio playback, of course). And, having wasted far too many 
hours of my life screwing around with .asoundrc, I can say with certainty 
that there is nothing simple (or indeed, even usally documented) about 
the contents of that file. :)

(Apologies for not rolling this in to my previous reply)

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Re: PulseAudio

[Sam Morris]

On Thu, 18 Jul 2013 09:14:56 +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:

>>>>> PulseAudio piles another layer of possible failures on top of a
>>>>> kernel driver, and hides most of the audio mixer for no particularly
>>>>> good reason other than "it might confuse the poor user". It just
>>>>> doesn't make any sense to me.
>>>>
>>>> Some sound cards expose two dozens or more level adjustments which
>>>> most people don't even understand.
>>>
>>> I've never seen a setup where there wasn't a "master" mixer.
>> 
>> Which often doesn't help if some other adjustment has been turned off
>> or set to a very low level.
> 
> If that is the case, usually it's fairly easy to spot.

As a former owner of a SoundBlaster Live! card, it was *never* easy to 
spot. I recall at least 30 mixer sliders and 15 switches, most of which 
did nothing except when they made audio output stop working. God help you 
if you ever wanted to hook up surround sound kit!

Just looking at <http://haakoh.at.ifi.uio.no/emu10k1/> brings back deep, 
dark memories of fear and loathing. PulseAudio is a godsend.

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Re: systemd .service file conversion

[Sam Morris]

On Thu, 30 May 2013 11:38:22 +0200, Salvo Tomaselli wrote:
> I have tried systemd, and I like the approach it has, and in a few years
> I believe it has potential. But... using it to restart my computer i
> need to do an hard reset (and think of how happy would I be if my
> computer had been a server in a rack on the other side of the planet),
> and gave me several problems related to switching from X11 to vt and
> vice versa.

If you haven't already, please file bugs for these issues so that they 
can be investigated and fixed.

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Re: Debian Installer 7.0 Beta1 release

[Sam Morris]

On Mon, 2012-08-06 at 12:36 +0200, Julien Cristau wrote:
> On Mon, Aug  6, 2012 at 10:45:31 +0100, Sam Morris wrote:
> 
> > IIRC I built mesa with 3.0. I'll take a look at the patches. I also just
> > realised that I didn't run the X server with LD_LIBRARY_PATH set... is
> > that a problem, or is it just the clients that need the llvmpipe
> > libGL.so.1? Sorry for the dumb question, but my understanding of how all
> > the different bits of mesa/dri fit together is rather poor...
> > 
> Should be enough to run the session with LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1.
> 
> Cheers,
> Julien

I've now had some time to test this out. Currently gnome-shell is not
usable with llvmpipe:

 1. The screen flickers when switching between applications, or when
entering/leaving overview mode. The flickering is between the
correct screen contents and a copy of the old screen contents.
For instance, while typing this message I go into overview mode.
I then click on Evolution's composer window, and the composer
comes to the front. However, after the animation finishes, only
the composer's text entry area is visible; the rest of the
screen still displays the overview mode. The other applications
are still present, however, as clicking where I know the windows
are placed causes them to flicker to the foreground. The
applications themselves seem functional, but it'such impossible
to actually use them. This behaviour does not show up if I use
gnome-shell's screen recording feature to make a movie. I took a
grainy movie with my phone however; you can see it at
<http://youtu.be/synr-avC0WA>.
 2. There is a small but noticeable delay between an event occurring
(e.g., pressing a key on the keyboard, or moving the mouse) and
the screen being updated. Worse, the delay is variable (hold
down a key while gedit has the focus and characters appear at an
uneven rate). This may be another aspect of whatever is causing
the first issue.
 3. The mouse pointer continually warps to the top-left corner of
the screen, triggering the overview mode at random. This is a
bug in the evdev input driver, filed as
<http://bugs.debian.org/688860>.

I can try building mesa with LLVM 3.1, and/or try some of the patches at
<http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/mesa.git/tree/?h=f17> or
<http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/mesa.git/tree/?h=f18> if you think
they will help.

Regards,

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Re: Minified javascript files

[Sam Morris]

On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 22:35:07 +0200, Pau Garcia i Quiles wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 9:50 PM, Sam Morris  wrote:
> 
>>>> > So yes, we have the problem for precompiled windows DLLs in a
>>>> > source package.
>>>>
>>>> Interesting, that issue seems rather common.  Maybe a lintian check
>>>> could alarm packagers of this?
>>> http://lintian.debian.org/tags/source-contains-prebuilt-windows-
>> binary.html
>>
>> This includes:
>>
>> tcltrf (source)
>>  * win/msvcrt.dll
>>
>> This is part of Windows. I don't expect Debian has been granted
>> permission to distribute it. :)
> 
> Are you sure it's not wine's?
> 
> http://source.winehq.org/WineAPI/msvcrt.html

Doesn't look like it:

$ strings -e l win/msvcrt.dll
...
VS_VERSION_INFO
StringFileInfo
040904B0
CompanyName
Microsoft Corporation
FileDescription
Microsoft (R) C Runtime Library
FileVersion
5.00.7128
InternalName
MSVCRT.DLL
LegalCopyright
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. 1981-1997
OriginalFilename
MSVCRT.DLL
ProductName
Microsoft (R) Visual C++
ProductVersion
5.00.7128
VarFileInfo
Translation

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Re: Minified javascript files

[Sam Morris]

On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 16:43:51 +0600, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:03:23PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>> > So yes, we have the problem for precompiled windows DLLs in a source
>> > package.
>> 
>> Interesting, that issue seems rather common.  Maybe a lintian check
>> could alarm packagers of this?
> http://lintian.debian.org/tags/source-contains-prebuilt-windows-
binary.html

This includes:

tcltrf (source)
 * win/msvcrt.dll

This is part of Windows. I don't expect Debian has been granted 
permission to distribute it. :)

I wonder how many of these DLLs and EXEs link together code licensed 
under the GPL with versions of the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime that does 
not ship with Windows (and hence qualify for the 'major parts of the 
operating system' exception)?

«i686-w64-mingw32-objdump -p foo.dll | grep 'DLL Name'» will output a 
list of dependant DLLs. The bad ones to look for match at least «msvc[pr]
[0-9]+.dll» or «mfc[0-9]+.dll» (case-insensitively). I'd do this myself, 
but I don't have the hard drive space nor the bandwidth here, sorry.

Regards,

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Re: Debian Installer 7.0 Beta1 release

[Sam Morris]

On Mon, 2012-08-06 at 10:26 +0200, Julien Cristau wrote:
> On Sun, Aug  5, 2012 at 12:54:16 +0000, Sam Morris wrote:
> 
> > I figured it out. The instructions at <http://www.mesa3d.org/
> > llvmpipe.html> seem to work. I had some difficulty getting 
> > LD_LIBRARY_PATH to stick, however... setting it from a script in /etc/X11/
> > Xsession.d doesn't work as it's reset by the time I log in. Eventually I 
> > logged in to a virtual console, set the variable, fired up X by hand and 
> > ran gnome-shell. The result is very buggy. I don't know if that's because 
> > mesa 8.0.4 (or one of its build dependencies) is too old, or whether 
> > something is being built wrong.
> > 
> A few things I can think of:
> - f17 seems to build against llvm 3.0, we use 2.9
> - there's a few patches in
>   http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/mesa.git/tree/?h=f17 if updating
>   llvm isn't enough.
> 
> I'd be interested in the results.
> 
> Cheers,
> Julien

IIRC I built mesa with 3.0. I'll take a look at the patches. I also just
realised that I didn't run the X server with LD_LIBRARY_PATH set... is
that a problem, or is it just the clients that need the llvmpipe
libGL.so.1? Sorry for the dumb question, but my understanding of how all
the different bits of mesa/dri fit together is rather poor...


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Re: Debian Installer 7.0 Beta1 release

[Sam Morris]

On Sun, 05 Aug 2012 10:58:24 +, Sam Morris wrote:

> On Sat, 04 Aug 2012 20:16:32 +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> 
>> Le samedi 04 août 2012 à 18:28 +0100, Ben Hutchings a écrit :
>>> This is expected in the absence of 3D acceleration, which is not yet
>>> supported in qemu so far as I know.  VirtualBox is supposed to support
>>> it, but a standard installation presumably won't pull in the necessary
>>> paravirtual drivers in the guest.
>> 
>> At least with squeeze, this used to work, so I don’t see why it
>> wouldn’t anymore.
>> 
>> However I don’t know whether the vbox paravirtualized drivers are
>> whitelisted in gnome-session-check-accelerated.
> 
> The string "Chromium" is not listed in
> /usr/share/gnome-session/hardware- compatibility, so the VirtualBox
> guest additions are neither white nor blacklisted. However, in my
> experience, gnome-shell 3.4 is unusable on VirtualBox. I filed a bug
> with the details at <https://www.virtualbox.org/
> ticket/9581>.
> 
> In case it matters, I use Debian on two desktops, both inside VirtualBox
> VMs running on top of Windows 7 x64. Both systems have ATI graphics
> cards (one a Radeon HD 4980, and the other a Radeon HD 5850).
> 
> OTOH, the software rendering in both the Fedora 17 and GNOME 3.4 Live
> CDs works perfectly inside VirtualBox (well, at least for a few minutes
> of testing). In both cases the renderer is reported as "Gallium 0.4 on
> llvmpipe (LLVM 0x300)". However, these Live CDs do not include the
> VirtualBox guest additions, and I have no idea how to enable Gallium on
> Debian, so I can't test on my regular VM that has VirtualBox's regular
> 2d acceleration set up. If someone can point me in the right direction
> then I'll test it right now!

I figured it out. The instructions at <http://www.mesa3d.org/
llvmpipe.html> seem to work. I had some difficulty getting 
LD_LIBRARY_PATH to stick, however... setting it from a script in /etc/X11/
Xsession.d doesn't work as it's reset by the time I log in. Eventually I 
logged in to a virtual console, set the variable, fired up X by hand and 
ran gnome-shell. The result is very buggy. I don't know if that's because 
mesa 8.0.4 (or one of its build dependencies) is too old, or whether 
something is being built wrong.

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Re: Debian Installer 7.0 Beta1 release

[Sam Morris]

On Sat, 04 Aug 2012 20:16:32 +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:

> Le samedi 04 août 2012 à 18:28 +0100, Ben Hutchings a écrit :
>> This is expected in the absence of 3D acceleration, which is not yet
>> supported in qemu so far as I know.  VirtualBox is supposed to support
>> it, but a standard installation presumably won't pull in the necessary
>> paravirtual drivers in the guest.
> 
> At least with squeeze, this used to work, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t
> anymore.
> 
> However I don’t know whether the vbox paravirtualized drivers are
> whitelisted in gnome-session-check-accelerated.

The string "Chromium" is not listed in /usr/share/gnome-session/hardware-
compatibility, so the VirtualBox guest additions are neither white nor 
blacklisted. However, in my experience, gnome-shell 3.4 is unusable on 
VirtualBox. I filed a bug with the details at .

In case it matters, I use Debian on two desktops, both inside VirtualBox 
VMs running on top of Windows 7 x64. Both systems have ATI graphics cards 
(one a Radeon HD 4980, and the other a Radeon HD 5850).

OTOH, the software rendering in both the Fedora 17 and GNOME 3.4 Live CDs 
works perfectly inside VirtualBox (well, at least for a few minutes of 
testing). In both cases the renderer is reported as "Gallium 0.4 on 
llvmpipe (LLVM 0x300)". However, these Live CDs do not include the 
VirtualBox guest additions, and I have no idea how to enable Gallium on 
Debian, so I can't test on my regular VM that has VirtualBox's regular 2d 
acceleration set up. If someone can point me in the right direction then 
I'll test it right now!

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Re: where is /etc/hosts supposed to come from?

[Sam Morris]

On Wed, 30 Dec 2009 21:28:52 +0100, Vincent Bernat wrote:

> OoO Pendant le  temps de midi du mercredi 30  décembre 2009, vers 12:03,
> Gabor Gombas  disait :
> 
>>> If this is a real question, put:
>>> 127.0.1.1 fqdn nodename
>>> 
>>> This seems a  very acceptable way to give a FQDN  to your laptop
>>> without relying  on network.  hostname -f  and  programs using  a
>>> similar  inner working will be able to get the right result.
> 
>> Adding meaningless configuration to work around programs that are
>> broken by design does not seem like a good solution.
> 
> There are  a lot of  programs requiring some  kind of FQDN  (for example
> because they implement a protocol requiring it). How should they get it?
> I have never  seen a more universal that to get  node name with uname(),
> then use gethostbyname(). Please, provide better way.

The admin should supply it in the program's configuration, since only the 
admin is able to know the correct value.

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Re: where is /etc/hosts supposed to come from?

[Sam Morris]

On Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:03:12 +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

> On 2009-12-28 23:41:38 +0000, Sam Morris wrote:
>> Details in <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=316099>. I
>> do wonder, however, why the system hostname has to appear in /etc/hosts
>> at all? Programs that want to find it out can read /etc/hostname
>> directly, after all. And wtf is 'localdomain' for, anyway?
> 
> Programs may need the FQDN, even without any network connection (for
> instance, even local mail messages should have a Message-Id). And
> /etc/hostname doesn't necessarily contain the FQDN.

Hm, but shouldn't they use another method to get it? My laptop has no 
FQDN when it is not connected to a network, and even when it is, it has 
never, to my knowledge, had a fully qualified name that could be resolved 
to find out its network address.

Conversely, I have used servers that had multiple network interfaces, 
some of which even have multiple network addresses assigned to them. 
'hostname -f' did not yield a sensible result on a couple of these 
systems.

What would a hypothetical host that only had IPv6 connectivity do? We 
certainly don't have a line analogous to the '127.0.1.1' hack in /etc/
hosts for ipv6, and I'm not even sure what such a line would look like, 
since ::1 has a /128 netmask.

As for mail, we already appear to have an /etc/mailname file for MTAs and 
MUAs to use for finding out the 'canonical' name of the host for message-
IDs and the like.

> Also, it is required that the FQDN be resolvable (but I wonder whether
> this is useful in practice).

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Re: where is /etc/hosts supposed to come from?

[Sam Morris]

On Sun, 27 Dec 2009 14:22:53 -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 01:25:55PM -0800, Daniel Moerner wrote:
>> On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 12:50 PM, Russell Coker 
>> wrote:
>> > I've just done a debootstrap install of Lenny, and /etc/hosts doesn't
>> > exist. Where is /etc/hosts supposed to come from?  I think it should
>> > have something like the following (copied from an ancient Debian
>> > install).
> 
>> > 127.0.0.1       localhost
> 
>> > # The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts ::1    
>> > ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
>> > fe00::0 ip6-localnet
>> > ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
>> > ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
>> > ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
>> > ff02::3 ip6-allhosts
> 
>> For debootstrapped installs, it's not automatically created by
>> anything. The recommended setup is almost the same as that, although as
>> Neil said you still need to add a hostname on to the first line.
> 
> No, the hostname should be set on a *separate* line, mapped to
> 127.0.1.1, as we've been doing for years now.  Setting an equivalence
> between localhost and the hostname causes all manner of problems due to
> hostname canonicalization.

Details in <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=316099>. I 
do wonder, however, why the system hostname has to appear in /etc/hosts 
at all? Programs that want to find it out can read /etc/hostname 
directly, after all. And wtf is 'localdomain' for, anyway?

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Re: Is it time to remove sun-java6?

[Sam Morris]

On Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:14:20 +, Sam Morris wrote:

> On Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:44:21 -0400, Barry deFreese wrote:
>> There has also been some similar discussions in Ubuntu with some users
>> reporting that some web sites and packages don't work with openjdk but
>> I have not seen a lot of concrete proof.
> 
> Last time I tried the Java Climate Model (which can be found at http://
> www.climate.be/jcm) it failed to work with openjdk.

Ok, I tried it again and it seems to work fine! Great!

The menus and tabs are a bit screwed up in the (default) GTK+ look-and-
feel, but that's never really 100% worked even with Sun's official Java 
version.

I just rememberd another thing that didn't work with openjdk... WebSDR, a 
software radio reciever <http://www.websdr.org/>.

Unfortunately I can't test this at the moment (audio in my VirtualBox 
system decided to stop working), so I'd be greatful if you could take a 
look. If you go to http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ and drag the yellow 
bar under the waterfall displays around, you should hear the sounds of a 
radio 'tuning'.

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Re: Is it time to remove sun-java6?

[Sam Morris]

On Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:44:21 -0400, Barry deFreese wrote:
> There has also been some similar discussions in Ubuntu with some users
> reporting that some web sites and packages don't work with openjdk but I
> have not seen a lot of concrete proof.

Last time I tried the Java Climate Model (which can be found at http://
www.climate.be/jcm) it failed to work with openjdk.

> My personal feeling is that we either need to remove it or fix it up.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Barry deFreese

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Where should DLL files go?

[Sam Morris]

The gcc-mingw32 package provides GCC configured to target Microsoft
Windows. The executables built by GCC will pick up a dependency on
libgcc_s_sjlj-1.dll; the question of where that file should be placed on
a Debian system has arisen.

Although on Debian, the same shared library files (libfoo.so) are used
by both compilers to link against, and ld-linux (what is that thing
called? The "loader"? The "linker"?) to satisfy runtime dependencies,
Windows works differently. The compiler links against 'foo.lib'; this
may either be a static library, in which case its contents are copied
into the final executable, or it may be a 'stub' for a dynamically
linked library (DLL). In the latter case, Windows will expect to find
'foo.dll' in the same directory as the executable that links against it.

See <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=540783> for more
background information.

So, where do we put DLL files on a Debian system?

Upstream chose /usr/bin; this is where the libgcc DLL is installed by
GCC's Makefiles. It is where one would have to place a DLL file if one
were maintaining a FHS hierarchy on a Windows system, and is also where
cygwin and msys place put their DLL files in their packages.

The FHS itself doesn't say anything on the matter, it not being targeted
at Windows.

From a multiarch point of view, perhaps the DLL could go
in /usr/lib/i586-mingw32msvc?

Anyway, the final location doesn't much matter, as long as the people
who need to find the DLL can do so easily.

Thoughts?

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Re: abiword package lacks maintenance

[Sam Morris]

On Sun, 22 Mar 2009 02:27:51 +0900, Masayuki Hatta wrote:

>> the abiword package, maintained by mhatta and joshk, could definitely
>> use some more care. The version that is in Debian was released back in
>> Nov 2006 [1], and it currently includes a grave bug that makes the
>> package nearly unusable on amd64 [2].
> 
>> [1] http://www.abisource.com/downloads/abiword/ [2]
>> http://bugs.debian.org/514525

As the submitter of that bug, I'd certainly appreciate it very much if a 
fixed version would make the next Lenny point release. :)

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Re: Upcoming Section changes in the archive

[Sam Morris]

On Fri, 27 Feb 2009 02:13:48 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:

> Le jeudi 26 février 2009 à 17:08 -0800, Kelly Clowers a écrit :
>> On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 15:50, Josselin Mouette 
>> wrote:
>> > Le jeudi 26 février 2009 à 21:07 +0100, Joerg Jaspert a écrit :
>> >> ruby Everything about ruby, an interpreted
>> >> object oriented
>> >>  language.
>> >> java Everything about Java
>> >
>> > How about a "cli" section about everything related to Mono and the
>> > Common Language Infrastructure (aka .NET) ? That makes quite a number
>> > of packages now.
>> 
>> Am I the only one that gets confused by the name "cli"? I always think
>> "command line interface" first and mono/.net second.
> 
> I don’t like the name either, but can you think of a better one? We
> could use “mono”, but it’s the implementation name.

'clr' (common language runtime)? It's the acronym that MS uses quite a 
bit.

Or 'msclr'? 'dotnetclr'?

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Re: Packages still depending on GTK+ 1.2

[Sam Morris]

On Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:06:26 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Colin Watson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>putty
>  => hotwire, a plain terminal…

According to <http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/
port-unix-gtk2.html>, PuTTY trunk will build against GTK+ 2.0.

\o/

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Re: DFSG violations in Lenny: Summarizing the choices

[Sam Morris]

On Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:39:26 -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:

> So if people think that they are going to be able to get firmware in
> source form so that popular wireless chips can be driven using 100% DFSG
> pure firmware, I suspect they will have a very long wait ahead of them. 
> The issue is that software controlled radios are cheaper, and that
> drives the mass market, so that will be what most manufacturers will
> use.

Here's an interesting problem with DFSG-free firmware such as those 
created by the FreeMAC project (for prism54 cards): if they never get FCC-
certified, is it legal for Debian to distribute them? They seem to fall 
into the category of DFSG-free-but-illegal software such as dvdcss or the 
patented software that we refuse to distribute. So unless the project 
bends a little here, users are never going to get working hardware no 
matter what happens.

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Re: DFSG violations in Lenny: Summarizing the choices

[Sam Morris]

On Sat, 08 Nov 2008 22:24:16 -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:

> On Sun, 2008-11-09 at 00:39 -0500, Theodore Tso wrote:
>> > And none of this is really relevent: the DFSG and the Social Contract
>> > do not contain an exception for dishonest or scared hardware
>> > manufacturers, or stupid FCC policies.
>> 
>> Neither does it (currently) contain an exception for debian.org
>> machines, or very popular Dell machines with Broadcom ethernet
>> firmware.  Great!  Cut them off!!  Let's see how quickly we can get
>> users moving to non-official kernels and installers when the official
>> ones don't work for them.  Then we can stop fighting about it.  The
>> DFSG hard liners can go on using the DFSG free kernels, and everyone
>> else can either move to another distribution or use an unofficially
>> forked kernel package and installer.
> 
> Why not just support it in non-free exactly the way we do other things?
> 
> Thomas

I'd prefer to see firmware in a separate section, because it will be 
easier to get that section enabled by default for new installs. This will 
mean that the installer, or something hooked up to udev/hal, etc., will 
be able to automatically install the packages that the user requires.

Currently, the user needs to be an expert Linux user in order to 
recognise the symptoms of missing firmware, and then go and track that 
firmware down and manually install it.

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Re: Etch->Lenny upgrade mutes some/many old laptops.

[Sam Morris]

On Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:14:35 +0300, Joona Kiiski wrote:

>>It should be documented: yes.
>>But what's your problem? It is the same situation as for so much other
>>hardware like WLAN, etc. And the sound card is not even essential for
>>booting or downloading additional software.
>>And no need to write a driver: it is still there.
> 
> I think you didn't get the main point, I'm not too worried about the
> sound of my ten years old laptop, I didn't even (yet) care to test the
> fix. I'm much more worried about what things like this are going to
> cause for the overall popularity of the debian. In case you didn't know,
> 99% of western people don't know how to read kernel log or build and
> install firmware from source. They don't even know what kernel means,
> and really they shouldn't have to.
> 
> Think for example my mother. She uses her computer for reading mail,
> writing text, watching movies, listening to music, playing small java
> games. I could install debian for her laptop and quickly teach how to do
> those things. Then after using her computer for one year, she makes
> upgrade and BANG! She can hear no more music, or she cannot use WLAN
> anymore! She goes to shop, and buys Windows Vista and gets her neighbour
> to install it for her. Typical death of linux.
> 
> If you  fanatics cannot start to look things from my mother's
> point of view, debian will not ever become popular. Now I cannot
> honestly recommend debian to any of my friends, because instead of
> making hard things simple, you are making simple things harder.
> 
> It's just totally frustrating to see that huge effort put in X (it's
> nowadays unbelievably easy to configure) is meaningless if you
> intentionally break newbie users' systems in other ways (this time by
> removing fully functional kernel firmware, next time, who knows...).
> 
> Sorry for being rude. I'm just very angry.

At some time in the future it will hopefully be possible for udev(?) to 
get the 'missing firmware' event from the kernel; udev will be able to 
tell HAL(?) about the event, and HAL will be able to announce the missing 
firmware on the system message bus.

Then a program that runs as part of the user's desktop environment will 
be able to recieve the message and help the user locate a copy of the 
firmware, download and install it.

Maybe :)

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Re: Possible mass bug filing: The possibility of attack with the help of symlinks in some Debian packages

[Sam Morris]

On Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:57:56 +0400, Dmitry E. Oboukhov wrote:

> Package: mplayer nws ppp twiki
> Severity: grave
> Tags: security
> 
> This message about the error concerns a few packages  at  once.   I've
> tested all the packages on my Debian mirror.  (post|pre)(inst|rm)  and
> config scripts were tested.
> 
> In some packages I've discovered scripts with errors which may be used
> by a user for damaging important system files.
> 
> For example if a script uses in its work a temp file which is  created
> in /tmp directory, then every user can create symlink  with  the  same
> name in this directory in order to  destroy  or  rewrite  some
system
> file.

A while ago, the use of libpam-tmpdir was suggested in order to mitigate 
some of these attacks. It would be nice to see it in use by default, some 
day.

Obviously there will always be some programs that don't look at the 
TMPDIR environment variable and directly use /tmp. Isn't there some fancy 
thing in current kernels that allows /tmp to be mounted individually for 
each user?

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Re: Annoying GTK2 file dialogue - where to file the BUG?

[Sam Morris]

On Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:12:56 +0200, Rudi Effe wrote:

> (2) there is no option to sort by size or to even display size.
> maybe this must be enabled by the calling app (audacity here) - but
> if this option is not diallowed explicitly, it should be possible to
> add it by the browsing user.

In fact, there is already a bug about this: <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/
show_bug.cgi?id=325095>

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Re: Annoying GTK2 file dialogue - where to file the BUG?

[Sam Morris]

On Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:12:56 +0200, Rudi Effe wrote:

> Dear list,
> 
> for some reason, Debian favors Gnome to be the default desktop. My
> reason for using KDE is mainly Gnomes file browser. But as a matter of
> fact, major applications are using the GTK2 libraries (Mozilla,
> Openoffice.org, Gimp, Audacity etc.) - and Opneoffice.org is the only
> one that allows to use the KDE file selector.
> 
> Now, what's wrong with the GTK2 file chooser? I will report a bug if
> anybody could name the package/library I have to refer to.
> 
> Look at this screen shot for instance:
> 
>   http://imagebin.ca/view/wxHN3lH.html
> 
> (1) all entries are displayed twice

This looks like a bug that should be filed at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ 
against the 'gtk+' product.

> (2) there is no option to sort by size or to even display size.
> maybe this must be enabled by the calling app (audacity here) - but
> if this option is not diallowed explicitly, it should be possible to
> add it by the browsing user.

Seems like a useful feature. You should file a bug at http://
bugzilla.gnome.org/ against the 'gtk+' product.

> (3) whenever I tell Mozilla to open a dialogue with a specific app,
> I can (to be quick) enter its path right in the file name box (say:
> /usr/bin/ark). Next time however, the file selector will start
> browsing that directory (/usr/bin) and produce a hang lasting at
> least 4-5 seconds. Suspecting - missing caching
> - slow algorithms
> - bad threading

The problem is that all the files in /usr/bin have MIME detection done on 
them, which takes ages. See <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?
id=322314> for further details.

> (4) missing eyecandiness: grey and simple icons, no rounded corners,
> dominating dark grey, low percentage of area used for content/
> information (too much frame).

This is simply due to the default GTK+ theme being, well, rubbish. If you 
change your theme to the default GNOME theme then things will look much 
better. You can do this by running gnome-appearance-properties which 
appears to work by fiddling with the values of the gconf keys under
'/desktop/gnome/interface'.


> Regards
> Rudi

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Re: esound [was: Re: Non-related 'Recommends' dependencies - bug or not?]

[Sam Morris]

On Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:44:23 +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:

> Last time I checked, libesd-alsa0 was still completely unusable (well,
> except for some weird kind of sound-based torture).

I regularly help users to find out why their sound has stopped working, 
and the cause is usually due to libesd0's esd holding the sound card 
open. Replacing libesd0 with libesd-alsa0 and killing esd makes 
everything work again.

libesd-alsa0 works perfectly for me and I wish we installed it by 
default. We would then be able to enable the 'enable software sound 
mixing (ESD)' setting by default so that event sounds in apps like gossip 
would work.

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Re: Finding installed packages which aren't part of debian

[Sam Morris]

On Sat, 15 Mar 2008 13:09:11 +0200, Lior Kaplan wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Is there any short way to find packages installed on a machine that
> can't be installed from our archives ?

On lenny or newer: 'aptitude search ~o'. That will search for packages 
that can't be found in _any_ repository known to apt. If instead you want 
to find non-Debian packages, try: 'aptitude search ~S~i\!~Odebian'. That 
will also work on sarge.

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Bug#466120: ITP: bash-doc-reference -- The Bash Reference Manual

[Sam Morris]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Sam Morris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

  Package name: bash-doc-reference
  Version : 3.1
  Upstream Author : Free Software Foundation, Inc.
  URL : http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/
  License : GFDL, with front and back-cover texts
  Description : The Bash Reference Manual

Bash is an sh-compatible command language interpreter that executes commands
read from the standard input or from a file.  Bash also incorporates useful
features from the Korn and C shells (ksh and csh). 

This package contains the Bash Reference Manual in HTML, Info and PDF formats.

- -- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (530, 'testing'), (520, 'unstable'), (510, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFHtyHyshl/216gEHgRAmBSAJ9ScegVEDIxsAdT+ZLAKJQNLGu1FACgwa4L
dmalbPnRrDfA3xjUsVUEbqI=
=ZZwP
-END PGP SIGNATURE-



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Re: Enabling and installing of "risky" ("patented") codecs - made easy

[Sam Morris]

On Tue, 23 Oct 2007 09:15:42 +0200, Fabian Greffrath wrote:

> Yes, we will need a separate archive for these packages which will be
> hosted outside the US. I am not sure if d-i should offer to add these
> sources (not sure if it's worth another question during installation),
> but the URI could be included in the default sources.list but commented
> out with a disclaimer.

I don't see why users in countries where software is not patentable 
should be forced to jump through hoops to get access to multimedia 
software. If this repository is not added to the user's sources.list file 
by default then there is no advantage in setting up yet another 
repository for such software.

I think the Debian project needs to seek legal advice on the subject. We 
need to know who actually becomes liable for patent infringement if we 
set up a repository in a country where software cannot be patented. I 
would guess the answer would be anyone who distributes the software; 
therefore it would be up to each mirror to decide whether to mirror this 
archive.

If this is the case, and if end users are not liable for downloading 
patentable software, then I don't see why d-i can't enable the source by 
default.

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Re: Debian's Linux kernel continues to regress on freedom

[Sam Morris]

On Wed, 12 Sep 2007 10:13:38 +0200, Bernd Zeimetz wrote:

> Why don't you start to send patches then. Seems you have enough free
> time to look after such issues. Fixing Kernels to work on more
> (sometimes even important machines, like buildds) is a much more
> important job than to get rid of oh so non-free firmware.

Could someone *please* look at #401482? gdb has been totally useless on 
i386 for almost a year now, and no one has responded to my bug report 
that includes a patch for the issue?

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Re: Installation of Recommends by default on October 1st

[Sam Morris]

On Wed, 01 Aug 2007 23:49:27 +0200, Julien BLACHE wrote:

> I'd really like it if we could keep apt-get as an advanced user tool;
> aptitude can be used in all the other cases.

The problem is that apt-get is *not* an advanced user tool. End users use 
it because they see it referenced in all our documentation, all the 
documentation they find elsewhere on the web and in our mailing list 
archives, all the conversations they have on IRC while trying to find 
help, etc...

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Re: Bug#435020: ITP: p54 -- Driver for Prism54 "softmac" 802.11 wireless LAN adapters

[Sam Morris]

On Sat, 28 Jul 2007 17:15:50 +0200, Hendrik Sattler wrote:
> Is that really worth it, knowing that it will probably never be in a
> stable release? There is also a p54 in wireless-dev, based on mac80211.
> Maybe you have knowledge of what's going on there? Please enlighten me.

The wireless-dev tree's p54 driver is the one I am going to package; I 
should have made that clearer in the ITP.

The p54 driver certainly seems stable enough for regular use based on my 
own testing of it.

I think that creating this package is worthwhile if it helps _anyone_ get 
their wireless hardware working under Linux, and if it lets upstream get 
_any_ useful feedback or bug reports.

PS, please CC me in your responses as I read debian-devel though Gmane 
and may miss out on your messages. :)

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Bug#435020: ITP: p54 -- Driver for Prism54 "softmac" 802.11 wireless LAN adapters

[Sam Morris]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Sam Morris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

  Package name: p54
  Version : 20070728-6e46e62
  Upstream Author : Jean-Baptiste Note, NetChip Technology, Inc.,
David Brownell, Michael Wu, Christian Lamparter,
Nokia Corporation
  URL : nominally http://prism54.org/ but it's hugely out of date
  License : GPL
  Programming Lang: C
  Description : Driver for Prism54 "softmac" 802.11 (wireless LAN) adapters

- -- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (530, 'testing'), (520, 'unstable'), (510, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-1-k7 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

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Re: Using standardized SI prefixes

[Sam Morris]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2007 20:11:23 -0400, Ivan Jager wrote:

> How many packages can you name that measure bytes in powers of 10? Are
> there any?

debian-installer does so (unless you are creating LVM Logical Volumes, in 
which case the units that you specify volume sizes in are base-2, but the 
units that volume sizes are displayed in remain baase-10)... :)

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Re: Making a multi-binary-kernel-module-package

[Sam Morris]

On Tue, 29 May 2007 14:18:54 +0200, Pascal Speck wrote:

> Yeah, same issue, but where can i get the source of this package with
> the /debian/ directory and all files. In Sources of these Programst the
> /debian directory is always missing.
> 
> Greez Pascal

A debian source package consists of an .orig.tar.gz, a .diff.gz and 
a .dsc (which describes the source, and references the other two files). 
It sounds like you may only be downloading the .orig.tar.gz.

If you go to <http://packages.debian.org/src:mga-vid> you can download 
all three, and extract the package with 'dpkg-source -x mga-vid_*.dsc'. 
(This is just a script that extracts the tar archive and applies the 
patch).

You can do all of that automatically if you run 'apt-get source vga-mod'.

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Re: Debian base system package list

[Sam Morris]

On Tue, 15 May 2007 08:19:50 +0200, sean finney wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-05-14 at 22:33 -0700, Carlos Ramirez wrote:
>> Is a file, webpage or command that can provide a list of packages that
>> are part of the Debian base system? I tried searching in various places
>> without much luck. Any help in the right direct is appreciated.

Some poiking about in apt's Packages list as described by sean will do 
the trick, although there is also a 'Priority: important' level, which I 
assume is installed by default along with required packages.

If the user opts to activate any 'tasks' during installation then even 
more packages will be installed. See '/usr/share/tasksel/debian-
tasks.desc' for the list of tasks, and '/usr/share/doc/tasksel/README.gz' 
to see how to interpret the contents of the debian-tasks.desc file.

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Re: The number of etch installations is rocketing...

[Sam Morris]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 13:53:51 +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> Anyway, popularity-contest give us feedback on the package usage, and
> even if the number of contributors do not match the number of installed
> systems, it still give us valuable feedback on the relative package
> usage. :)

BTW, is the data used to generate http://popcon.debian.org/stat/
release.png available from anywhere? There are now so many versions that 
the legend gets cut off, which is a shame.

I guess I'm looking for historical versions of (the top of) .

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Re: video codecs in HTML 5

[Sam Morris]

On Sat, 2007-03-24 at 14:26 +0100, Maik Merten wrote:
> Martijn van Oosterhout schrieb:
> > Sorry, this doesn't follow. Calling the tag  is completely
> > orthoginal to whether it's implemented by a plugin or not. To support
> > it all Firefox et al would need to do is convert it to the equivalent
> >  tag or whatever internally...
> 
> The  tag is supposed to offer "first class" support for video
> content just like  usually supports JPEG and GIF in a way so
> content providers can rely on it.
> 
> To the end user it shouldn't matter if  is transformed to 
> on-the-fly.

I thought that HTML was going in the other direction--deprecating 
in favour of the already-existing and perfectly logical .

I really can't see what the point of this  tag is in the first
place.

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signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part

Re: video codecs in HTML 5

[Sam Morris]

On Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:26:25 -0500, Steve Greenland wrote:

> That's all true, but if the standard requires (or recommends) MPEG4
> support, then that's what everyone will use, and we'll be screwed,

It's probably more accurate to say that no matter what the standard says, 
Microsoft will ignore it and only implement Windows Media formats, which 
everyone will use, and we'll be screwed. :(

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Bug#415641: ITP: xchat-idle -- XChat plugin that marks you /away and /back automatically

[Sam Morris]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Sam Morris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

  Package name: xchat-idle
  Version : 1.0
  Upstream Author : Sam Morris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
  URL : http://robots.org.uk/src/xchat/
  License : GPL
  Programming Lang: C
  Description : XChat plugin that marks you /away and /back automatically

This XChat plugin automatically issues the /away and /back commands based on
 the amount of time that your session has been idle.

- -- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (530, 'testing'), (520, 'unstable'), (510, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-4-k7
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

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=2fua
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Bug#412399: ITP: islsm -- Driver for Prism54 "softmac" 802.11 wireless LAN adapters

[Sam Morris]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Sam Morris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

  Package name: islsm
  Version : git-20061017
  Upstream Author : Jean-Baptiste Note, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Feyd,
Denis Vlasenko, Martin Langer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Christian Lamparter, Holden Karau, 
Xandros, Intersil
Americas Inc., NetChip Technology, 
Inc., Luis R.
Rodriguez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Intel Corporation,
Aurelien Alleaume , 
Conexant Americas Inc.,
David Brownell, Herbert Valerio Riedel 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Nokia
Corporation, Junio C Hamano, Red Hat, 
Inc., 
  URL : http://islsm.org/~jb/islsm/
  License : GPL
  Programming Lang: C
  Description : Driver for Prism54 "softmac" 802.11 wireless LAN adapters

- -- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (530, 'testing'), (520, 'unstable'), (510, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-3-k7
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

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=afkU
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Bug#405300: ITP: pyxplot -- A command-line plotting package that produces publication-quality output

[Sam Morris]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Sam Morris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

  Package name: pyxplot
  Version : 0.5.8
  Upstream Author : Name <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
  URL : http://www.pyxplot.org.uk/
  License : GPL
  Programming Lang: Python
  Description : A command-line plotting package that produces 
publication-quality output

PyXPlot is a command-line graphing/plotting package that combines very
high-quality output with a simple interface based on that of Gnuplot.

- -- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (530, 'testing'), (520, 'unstable'), (510, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-3-k7
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

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Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)

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B95mapjiWnhzPaejIBBYlJk=
=a/Gl
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Re: libesd0 v libesd-alsa0

[Sam Morris]

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 13:55:03 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:

> Le mercredi 20 décembre 2006 à 11:33 +0000, Sam Morris a écrit :
>> On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 10:15:47 +0300, Vladimir Kozlov wrote:
>> > Somehow I had libesd0 installed while I have alsa as well, and this
>> > prevents alsa from working properly - I had to do alsaconf after each
>> > reboot.
>> > Shouldn't the libesd-alsa0 be automatically installed with alsa instead
>> > the libesd0?
>> > 
>> > Please CC me as I'm not in the debian-devel list.
>> 
>> It is a shame that libesd0 is instaled by default instead of libesd-alsa0
>> but AFAIK it's too late in the release cycle to do anything about it. :(
>> 
>> I think the best way would be to change the shlibs information for
>> libesd0 so that packages that use it end up depending on "libesd-alsa0 |
>> libesd0". However that would require a rebuild of all depending packages.
>> 
>> Perhaps the installer could be hacked to install libesd-alsa0 by default
>> or something. It would be great if we didn't have to go through _another_
>> release where users will have to put up with programs hogging their sound
>> cards, especially since alsa-lib now has software mixing configured by
>> default.
> 
> Last time I tried, libesd-alsa0 was corrupting sound in a horrible way.
> 
> In all cases, as esound is buggy and unmaintained in Debian, it is
> deactivated by default at least in all GNOME software. The default for
> gstreamer, vlc, xine and others is to use direct ALSA output, which, as
> you explained, has software mixing enabled by default.

This doesn't seem to be the case. I noticed this problem because I have
had to help a couple of newbies on IRC get their sound working over the
last couple of days. In both cases the culprit was esd which was holding
open the sound device. Installing libesd-alsa0 and killing esd made
everything work again.

Perhaps it was something they did to their systems themselves after
installing Etch?

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Re: libesd0 v libesd-alsa0

[Sam Morris]

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006 10:15:47 +0300, Vladimir Kozlov wrote:
> Somehow I had libesd0 installed while I have alsa as well, and this
> prevents alsa from working properly - I had to do alsaconf after each
> reboot.
> Shouldn't the libesd-alsa0 be automatically installed with alsa instead
> the libesd0?
> 
> Please CC me as I'm not in the debian-devel list.

It is a shame that libesd0 is instaled by default instead of libesd-alsa0
but AFAIK it's too late in the release cycle to do anything about it. :(

I think the best way would be to change the shlibs information for
libesd0 so that packages that use it end up depending on "libesd-alsa0 |
libesd0". However that would require a rebuild of all depending packages.

Perhaps the installer could be hacked to install libesd-alsa0 by default
or something. It would be great if we didn't have to go through _another_
release where users will have to put up with programs hogging their sound
cards, especially since alsa-lib now has software mixing configured by
default.

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Re: Gnome crashing/freezing on testing machine

[Sam Morris]

On Sun, 03 Dec 2006 13:30:11 +, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> occasions), I can't even kill the GNOME process (kill -9 failed on
> several processes running under GNOME).  That's really weird, and I've
> never seen this sort of behaviour before.

That can happen if the process is in uninterruptible sleep (i.e. waiting
for IO to complete). If this is the case, ps and top should reveal the
process' status as 'D'.

The only time I've observed a process in this state is when experiencing
hardware problems, e.g., a process blocks in state D while tyring to read
from under /proc/bus/usb after the kernel's USB subsystem is hosed by my
evil MP3 player. So if your processes are in this state, try finding out
what file descriptor they are trying to read from (with strace -p $pid)
and then looking up the fd in the list of open files (lsof -p $pid).

Of course, it might be something totally different. ;)

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Re: default ext3 options

[Sam Morris]

On Tue, 14 Nov 2006 13:10:06 +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> [Bastian Venthur]
>> And since some users might be happily running Debian for years without
>> needing the Debian installer -- what can we do to let those users
>> benefit from enhancements a new Debian Installer brings?
> 
> As far as I know, neither the resize_inode nore the dir_index ext3
> option can be securely added after the file system is created.

According
to
<http://groups.google.co.uk/group/linux.debian.devel/msg/4d987ea414438e70>,
it should be perfectly safe to add dir_index to an existing filesystem.
However, to get the benefit of the indexing for already-created
directories, e2fsck -D should be run after dir_index has been added;
therefore it's probably best to just document the procedure in the release
notes.

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Re: trouble finding source for mail-notification on i386

[Sam Morris]

On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 12:11:13 -0400, Tim Olsen wrote:

> The latest source for mail-notification has a version number of 3.0.dfsg.1-7
> 
> However, the latest i386 binary for mail-notification has a version
> number of 3.0.dfsg.1-7+b1
> 
> What does the extra +b1 mean?  How do I recreate the i386 build of
> mail-notification?

It's a 'binary Non-Maintainer Upload' (binary NMU). The package was rebuilt
without any changes to the source code, often to make sure
that a it is built with the latest correct library dependencies. Check the
package's changelog.Debian for the exact reason why it was rebuilt.

> 
> thanks,
> Tim

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Re: Will IceWeasel be based on a fork or on vanilla FireFox?

[Sam Morris]

On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 11:43:51 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:

> "Sam Morris" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
>> It is unfortunate because of the user confusion that it will
>> cause. IMO, the firefox package should not be renamed to iceweasel.
> 
> If it's not renamed, we can't legally ship it. What, IYO, should be
> done to ship the existing program currently known as Firefox?

You misunderstand me. I merely think that it is clear that the 'iceweasel'
name has been claimed by the Gnuzilla project, and that using the same for
our own fork/branch/whatever will cause even more user confusion.
The 'firefox' package should be renamed to something else.

>> The package 'iceweasel' should be a package of the Gnuzilla project
>> of the same name.
> 
> I think there will be a serious attempt at collaborating with the
> Gnuzilla folks to try to resolve this confusion. Meanwhile, we're
> trying to get the existing Firefox into Debian as free software.

Surely such an attempt can only end in one of two outcomes: they rename,
or we rename. Since they used the name first, I think it is only polite
that we choose to rename; therefore why not pick a new name at the start
without having to drag Firefox users through *another* pointless name
transition?

 phoenix -> firebird -> firefox -> iceweasel -> ???

:)

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Re: Will IceWeasel be based on a fork or on vanilla FireFox?

[Sam Morris]

On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 00:22:53 +0200, Lech Karol Pawłaszek wrote:
> On Monday 16 October 2006 00:07, Jacobo Tarrio wrote:
>> El domingo, 15 de octubre de 2006 a las 22:06:21 +0200, Bastian Venthur
>> escribía:
>> > I've read on several blogs that IceWeasel will be based on a fork of
>> > FireFox and not just on vanilla FireFox. Is this true and if yes,
>> > why?
>>
>>  AIUI, it will be vanilla Firefox minus logo, minus "Firefox" name,
>>  plus
>> Debian patches.
>>
>>  The fact that GNU chose the name "Iceweasel" for their own fork of
>>  Firefox
>> is extremely unfortunate :-(
> 
> Why it is unfortunate? Mozilla Corporation doesn't want (Debian) to use
> firefox name without the artwork. And Debian can't distribute the
> artwork since it is DFSG-nonfree.

It is unfortunate because of the user confusion that it will cause. IMO,
the firefox package should not be renamed to iceweasel. The package
'iceweasel' should be a package of the Gnuzilla project of the same name.

> Kind regards

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Re: gdm/Gnome/KDE and device permissions

[Sam Morris]

On Wed, 11 Oct 2006 13:08:27 +0200, Gernot Salzer wrote:

> It seems that users have to be added to group "audio"
> in order to be able to access audio devices, group "video" to access
> video devices, "cdrom" to access cdrom, and so on. Or did I miss some
> setting during installation of etch?
> 
> Having to add users to particular groups is not reasonable in a
> desktop setting. There, one would like to have the current user
> at the console (logged in via gdm or similar) to be the one with
> exclusive rights on local devices (fixed ones like audio and video
> as well as variable ones like external usb devices).

I don't think it's possible to arrange for _exclusive_ access. Once a
user has been granted access to a group it is not really possible to
revoke the grant.

> Part of the problem can be solved by using libpam-permdev:
> it handles well fixed builtin devices like audio, video, cdrom,
> but fails with dynamic devices like usb sticks (the pam module
> is only active during login and therefore misses dynamic devices
> plugged in during the session).
> Moreover, since the module is not installed automatically with gdm,
> it doesn't seem to be the intended solution.

There is also pam_group which seems to do the same thing--adds users to
groups depending on their name, login method and time of day.

> For dynamic devices I haven't found a solution yet. Autodetection
> and automounting of e.g. usb sticks works with gnome, if there are
> entries in /etc/fstab. However, such entries are not reasonable
> since one doesn't know in advance which devices are plugged in
> in which order.

Since groups are only set when a user logs in it's not possible to e.g.,
add the user to the plugdev group when they plug in a USB stick. You'd
have to add them to plugdev when they log in.

I think HAL/PolicyTool/pam_foreground will eventually give us a
(slow?) solution to problems like this, but it's some way off at the
moment. Being able to add/revoke permissions with traditional security
methods (i.e. group membership) requires kernel modification AFAIK.

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Re: Starting daemons after install not always what the user wants, but what/how to do ?

[Sam Morris]

On Mon, 25 Sep 2006 19:59:06 +0200, Mike Hommey wrote:
> There is gnome-user-share, that uses apache2 to set up a web dav share
> on some random high port and make it available as a zeroconf service
> through avahi. The package depends on apache2. Thus, when installing
> gnome-user-share, while the user only wants to have the ability to share
> his own files through a gnome interface, he also gets a full http server
> running on port 80 of his computer, which he didn't really intend.
> 
> Expecting the user to disable apache by himself is not a solution.
> Desktop users are not all that clueful.
> 
> I could have filed a bug to apache2, but it is more of a general issue
> that needs a general solution, i think. A similar situation may already
> exist with some other packages, actually.
> 
> Now, the big question is, what do you, fellow DDs, think would be a
> solution for that problem of programs depending on other programs rather
> than the service they provide.
> 
> Mike

One way would be to split apache2 into, say, apache2 and apache2-bin.
apache2 would contain the init script and depend on apache2-bin, which
would contain the actual apache2 daemon. Then gnome-user-share can depend
on apache2-bin.

Of course it's not quite that simple, since apache2's init script is
actually already in apache2-common, which is depended upon by the
apache2-mpm-* packages. So the same split has already happened, but the
dependencies are in the reverse order to that which you need. :)

Speaking as a user, I am annoyed at packages that choose to implement
their own custom ways of disabling their daemons, instead of letting me
make the decision in the standard/documented way.

IMO, packages where there is a need for this functionality should be
split as above. For example, fetchmail-daemon (containing the init script)
which depends on fetchmail; spamassassin-spamd depending on spamassassin;
bittorrent-tracker depending on bittorrent; and so on.

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Bug#388586: /etc/profile contains PATH=/usr/bin/X11...

[Sam Morris]

reassign 388586 base-files
found 388586 3.1.16
thanks

/etc/profile is installed by the postinst of the base-files package;
reassigning appropriately.

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Re: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?

[Sam Morris]

On Mon, 28 Aug 2006 11:33:00 +0200, Mgr. Peter Tuharsky wrote:
>> Mplayer can be installed easily by adding the right line to your
>> sources.list. It's all over the internet. Same goes for codecs.
> 
> Yes, I'll try to replicate that sentence to my aunt or cousin. It will 
> be of great help for sure.
> Besides, if it is "that easy", why Debian just dosen't do it itself?

Are you offering to pay Debian's costs and damages for the resulting
patent and copyright lawsuits?

>> Besides, mplayer is starting to get increasingly obsolete. There are
>> less and less things that cannot be played by either gstreamer or xine.
>> Which both have a *much* saner design, too.
> 
> This is out of scope, however I also have much stuff that I cannot play 
> on neither of these, but can on Mplayer. And I don't mean Windows Media 
> by that.

Can you please file bug reports?

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Re: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?

[Sam Morris]

So can we do this? Load kernel modules or even extra udebs from a
CD/floppy/usb stick/URL that the user provides during the installation
process?

Now I think about it, I seem to remember doing this back with
boot-floppies, to get an e1000 network controller to be recognised by the
installer, IIRC.

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Re: Why does Ubuntu have all the ideas?

[Sam Morris]

On Sat, 26 Aug 2006 16:02:04 +0200, Hendrik Sattler wrote:
> Am Samstag 26 August 2006 15:15 schrieb Theodore Tso:
>> No support for: (The * are critical)
>>
>>  * SATA Hard Drives (*)
>>  * Intel AD1981 HD Audio (*)
> 
> This stuff did not even exist when Sarge was released. Half of userland would 
> not fit this hardware, so who cares.

How do other long-lived distributions handle this problem? How does one
install RHEL 4 on such a machine?

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Re: Packaging software which does not use autotools

[Sam Morris]

On Mon, 14 Aug 2006 21:50:51 +0200, Michael Rasmussen wrote:
> I intend to package a peace of software which does not use autotools  
> but only has a plain Makefile.
> 
> 1) Can I use dh_make?

Sure, just customise the rules file it generates to not call a configure
script. The rules file can really contain anything you want, as long as it
builds a decent package when called. :)

> 2) Does Debian policy have something to say about it?

Nope, I think mandating the build system that upstream uses is beyond its
scope. Unless upstream uses something non-free or something. :)

> 3) Would it be ok if I converted it to use autotools my self?

If you think it's worth the effort you can do, but you don't have to.

> 4) The project seems to be abandoned by the developers - I have send  
> more than one email with no response. Would it be in conflict with the  
> Debian Policy if a adopt the software - it has been released under GPL  
> so I guess it would be ok to do a fork?

No problems policy or legal-wise; you just have to consider how
supportable the software is. If it gets into the next Debian release and
has a security flaw discovered in it, can you help fix the bug?

Basically you don't want to end up in the situation that the mozilla-*
or php4 packagers are presently in, where there are serious security
problems in the package but no support from upstream for the old versions
of the package. Whether it's supportable depends on the size/complexity of
the software and your familiarity with it.

To answer your question 5, if you think other users might find the
software useful then go for it! :)

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Re: cdrtools

[Sam Morris]

> -   With Linux 2.6.x, it is impossible to run cdrecord without 
> root privs. 
>  
> Do not believe single persons who claim otherwise as Linux-2.6.x 
> filters away random SCSI commands when cdrecord does not have 
> root-privs and as cdrecord heavily depends on the fact that 
> the SCSI protocol depends on SCSI commands that "fail" because 
> they are not supported by the actual drive in order to correctly  
> support the features of the actual drive. 

Perhaps this stupid feud can soon become a thing of the past.
<http://lwn.net/Articles/193516/> indicates that future versions of the
kernel will allow userspace to control the list of SCSI commands that are
filtered. The cdrecord package can simply empty this list during bootup.

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Re: cdrtools

[Sam Morris]

On Thu, 06 Jul 2006 18:48:15 +0300, George Danchev wrote:

> On Thursday 06 July 2006 13:00, Daniel Baumann wrote:
>> Elimar Riesebieter wrote:
>> > are there any activities on that project?
>>
>> The licensing of cdrtools is/was under investigation of the Technical
>> Comitee, a final decision/action is not yet found/published so far.
>>
>> For the public part of the information, read on at
>> http://bugs.debian.org/350739
> 
> Could be an installer-only package (cdrtools-src or similar, like qmail-src 
> is) be a solution anyway ?

Such a package would cause large parts of the archive to be demoted into
contrib.

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Re: exim4 & spf: #377034 & #258210

[Sam Morris]

Take matters into your own hands. :)

The following is what I used to do to run exim4 4.50 with SPF checking.
I think that the same broad steps will also apply to more recent versions
of the package.

 # apt-get install build-essential libspf2-dev fakeroot
 # apt-get build-dep exim4
 $ apt-get source exim4
 $ cd exim4-4.50
 $ debian/rules unpack-configs
 $ cp EDITME.exim4-heavy EDITME.exim4-spf
 $ editor EDITME.exim4-spf
   change lines 346-349(?):
EXPERIMENTAL_SPF=yes
CFLAGS  += -I/usr/include/spf2
LDFLAGS += -lspf2
 $ debian/rules pack-configs # if there is an error here, ignore it(?)
 $ bash debian/create-custom-package spf
 $ fakeroot debian/rules builddaemonpackages=exim4-daemon-spf 
buildbasepackages=no binary

You will then have an exim4-daemon-spf package built in the parent
directory.

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Re: News from the python policy transition

[Sam Morris]

On Thu, 29 Jun 2006 16:25:17 +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote:

> Le mer 28 juin 2006 23:20, Raphael Hertzog a écrit :
>> So you don't have any excuse to not update your packages any more.
>> About 60% of the Python modules have already been updated, but 109
>> are left to be done:
>> http://bugs.debian.org/from:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>
>> The bugs have been filled two weeks ago, it is now time to NMU the
>> remaining packages where the maintainer didn't gave any update plan
>> in the bug report. We need your help for that.
> 
> I've done 16 of them already. that has also fixed 2 RC bugs as a side 
> effect (uninstallability bugs).
> 
> 7 other person like me, and it's old story !

I noticed the original list didn't include the python-gmenu package. The
source package (gnome-menus) produces some regular machine code packages as
well as the python module package. Perhaps there are others like this?

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Re: locales broken?

[Sam Morris]

On Fri, 21 Apr 2006 08:29:09 +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:

> Bastian Venthur wrote:
>> James Vega wrote:
> 
> [..]
> 
>> So should I file a bug against KDE(M) for not respecting
>> /etc/default/locale?
> 
> Known bug [1]. A corresponding bug report for gdm has been filed too
> already.
> 
> Cheers,
> Michael
> 
> [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=361089
> 
> Attachment not shown: MIME type application/pgp-signature; filename 
> signature.asc

Using pam_env breaks the expectation that /etc/default/locale be a
shell script (that gets sourced at some point during login). Why not
place a script in /etc/X11/Xsession.d that sources it? It can also be
sourced in /etc/profile to cover text-mode logins. Maybe it's too late for
this anyway, now. :(

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Re: System users that receive mail in /var/mail/systemuser?

[Sam Morris]

Andreas Metzler wrote:

Hello,
system users like proxy, sshd or identd usually do not receive any
mail at all. And system-users that _do_ receive mail are usually
redirected to a real user by /etc/aliases.

I do wonder whether it would be safe to reject any mail for
system-accounts (uid <1000 || uid >63434) unless it is redirected with
/etc/aliases?
cu andreas


Or just redirect all such mail to root, that way you don't have to keep 
/etc/aliases up to date for every package installed that creates a user.


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Re: Bug#357703: udev breaks syslog

[Sam Morris]

On Tuesday 28 March 2006 18:15, Marco d'Itri wrote:

On Mar 28, Gabor Gombas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

How about restarting syslog (or it's equivalent) after relocating the
old /dev? glibc already has infrastructure for restarting services on
upgrade, maybe udev can borrow that.

Harder than it looks. There are multiple syslog daemons, how can the
package know which one is installed and needs to be restarted?


Look in /proc and find out which process has the log socket open?  If that 
process belongs to one of the packaged syslog implementations (there aren't 
that many!) restart it.


That much is easy, but how do you turn a process ID into a script that 
can be invoke-rc.d'd?


Well, I suppose one could hard code in a list of packaged syslog daemons 
and the names of their init scripts, but that's pretty nasty.


IMO this is just foolishness caused by the hacks necessary to start udev 
immediatly after the package has been installed, rather than after the 
system is rebooted.



-- vbi


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Re: How to purge linux-image-2.6.14

[Sam Morris]

Cesare Leonardi wrote:
Recently i've talked with someone else that cannot purge the 2.6.14 
kernel, due to bug #344767. It's a known problem, already solved for 
2.6.15, but for people that still use 2.6.14 or have used it, the 
problem of purging it completely still exist.
For example on my machine, the various kernel images i've installed in 
the past, are now uninstalled but marked as "c" and if i try to purge 
them, the lock described in the bug report arise. Then i have to press 
CTRL+C to exit.

>
> [snip]


As suggested in the bug report, i've tryed to look at the postrm scripts 
in "/var/lib/dpkg/info/" but i cannot understand them adequately (i 
don't know perl).


You need to edit "/var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-image-2.6.14-2-k7.postrm". 
Comment out line 268, which reads: "$ret = stop ();". Then purge the 
package.



Regards.

Cesare.


PS - why do packages without any config files get into the config-files 
state in the first place? :)


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Re: klik, loop mounts, and insecurity [was: statement from one of the klik project members]

[Sam Morris]

Matthew Palmer wrote:

The klik client installation needs root privileges once, to add 7 lines
like this one to /etc/fstab:

 /tmp/app/1/image /tmp/app/1 cramfs,iso9660 user,noauto,ro,loop,exec 0
0


Doesn't this introduce a local root exploit?  A user can easily write
their own /tmp/app/1/image file which contains, say, a setuid root bash
executable.


Yes, that's exactly what I was afraid of, myself.


Please try "man mount". If your manpage is similar to mine, it will 
contain something like:


 snip --
OPTIONS
  user   Allow an ordinary user to mount the file system.  The name 
 of the mounting user is written to mtab so that he can un-

 mount the file system again.   This option implies the op-
 tions noexec, nosuid, and nodev (unless overridden by sub-
 sequent options, as in the option line user,exec,dev,suid).
 snap --

Note the part mentioning "nosuid" - and compare it to the fstab line 
used by klik.   :-)


You might want to read your manpage a bit more:

   nosuid   Do not allow set-user-identifier or set-group-identifier
bits to take effect. (This seems safe, but is in fact
rather unsafe if you have suidperl(1) installed.)
 
Particularly note the parenthetical sentence.


If suidperl does not ensure that the scripts it interprets have the suid 
bit set, then shouldn't a critical bug be filed?



On another point, I believe you said earlier that the admin is required to
add 7 of those lines to fstab before klik could be used.  Does that mean
that no more than 7 applications can be installed, or that no more than 7
users can use klik on the one machine?  Either way, it seems quite
artificially limiting.  If I have an 8th user who wants to use klik, what do
I do?


Write to lkml. ;) AFAIK Linux only supports eight loopback mounts at a 
time. This won't be a problem once FUSE becomes more widespread.



- Matt


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Bug#348209: ITP: smbnetfs -- User-space filesystem for SMB/NMB (Windows) network servers and shares

[Sam Morris]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Sam Morris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

  Package name: smbnetfs
  Version : 0.3.2
  Upstream Author : Mikhail Kshevetskiy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
  URL : http://smbnetfs.airm.net/
  License : GPL
  Description : User-space filesystem for SMB/NMB (Windows) network servers 
and shares

A user-space filesystem that contains an entire SMB/NMB network under a single
mount point. Workgroups, servers and shares can be browsed much like the
Network Neighbourhood in Microsoft Windows. If mounted at /mnt, files would
appear as /mnt/$workgroup/$server/$share/$file.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (530, 'testing'), (520, 'unstable'), (510, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.15-1-k7
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)


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Re: apt-get in Sid broke sound and /etc/modules?

[Sam Morris]

Alejandro Bonilla Beeche wrote:

Hi,

   I think this is udev's fault.

1. Nothing is apparently doing what /etc/modules says. (order)


Udev currently gets run by S04udev, /etc/modules is processed by 
S20module-init-tools. I think the processing of module-init-tools is 
going to be moved earlier in the boot sequence in a subsequent update.


2. My sound card is now not recognized, maybe this is because hotplug is 
not there anymore?
:00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 
82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)#


Do an lspci -n, and look up your card's Vendor and Device IDs in 
/lib/modules/$(uname -r)/modules.pcimap. If the corresponding module is 
not being loaded then file a bug against udev.



IBM T42

.Alejandro


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Bug#320213: ITP: pymsnt -- MSN transport for Jabber

[Sam Morris]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Sam Morris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

  Package name: pymsnt
  Version : 0.9.3
  Upstream Author : James Bunton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
  URL : http://msn-transport.jabberstudio.org/
  License : GPL
  Description : MSN transport for Jabber

PyMSNt provides a gateway which allows Jabber users to communicate with their
contacts on the MSN Messenger network. It can connect to  any Jabber server
that supports the Connect component mechanism.

The source package 'pymsnt' is available from mentors.debian.net. A binary
package for Sarge is available from my home page: http://robots.org.uk/debian/

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (530, 'testing'), (520, 'unstable'), (510, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-2-k7
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)


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Re: Question regarding "offensive" material

[Sam Morris]

Ralf Hildebrandt wrote:

I'm asking for guidance regarding this bug:
#313492: xscreensaver/GLSnake has sexually inappropriate imagery 


This reminds me all to well of the "hot-babe" controversity, with the
difference that xscreensaver has been in Debian for ages a nobody ever
complained about that "offensive" material.


Perhaps maintainers should publish PICS ratings[0] for each of their 
packages, which can be placed in the package control information, or 
incorporated into a debtags offensiveness facet? ;)


[0] <http://www.w3.org/PICS/>

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Re: Ongoing Firefox (and Thunderbird) Trademark problems

[Sam Morris]

Humberto Massa Guimarães wrote:

But is non-rebranded Firefox *really* distributable by us under
GPL#6, "no further restrictions"? It seems to me that if our users
can't customize and compile and distribute Firefox under the terms
of the GPL, we are passing along another restriction over those in
the GPL.

Obviously, I'm assuming that we are redistributing Firefox under the
terms of the GPL because IIRC the MPL is not DFSG-free.


/usr/share/doc/mozilla-firefox/copyright would seem to indicate Debian 
distributes Firefox under the MPL.


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Re: mplayer 1.0pre7

[Sam Morris]

A Mennucc wrote:
> mplayer 1.0pre7 is ready and packaged at
> http://tonelli.sns.it/pub/mplayer/sarge
If you are familiar with Christian Marillat's unofficial packages from 
<http://debian.video.free.fr/>, would you mind summarising the major 
differences between his package and yours? I'm just curious to see what 
formats, etc, had to be removed for Mplayer to be accepted into Debian.

The script that downloads binary codecs for unsupported media types is a 
nice touch. I see that it downloads the codecs from (mirrors of) 
Mplayer's own site; I guess therefore that having the script check 
cryptographic signatures of the downloaded files is out of the question. 
The script should probably be altered to check the downloaded files 
against the MD5SUMS file on the Mplayer mirrors, however.

Anyway, thanks for preparing the package and dowsing the flames; I hope 
it's accepted into the archive soon!

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Re: what is /.udev for ?

[Sam Morris]

Maykel Moya wrote:
I recently realized that I had /.dev, after that, I rm -fr it what
rendered my system unbootabled.
Can somebody point me to info regarding /.dev. I have dig
in /usr/share/doc/udev and Google but found nothing.
$ mount | grep \\.dev
/dev on /.dev type unknown (rw,bind)
When udev starts, your real /dev is bind mounted to /.dev so you can 
still access it for whatever reason. As you have noticed, wiping it out 
removes your real /dev, which means that your system won't be able to 
boot up to the point where it would normally start udev. :(

Some argue that this is one of the places where the old devfs is 
superior to udev. ;)

> Regards
> mike
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Re: software raid question/confusion

[Sam Morris]

David Dougall wrote:
I installed the mdadm package recently.  version 1.3.0-2
I do not want the md devices to be started when I reboot the server.  I
cannot find the config file which specifies this.  The only way I was able
to stop this was to edit /etc/init.d/mdadm-raid.
I can't even find what process is calling mdadm-raid.
Please advise.
--David Dougall

You if you delete all the links that match "/etc/rc?.d/S??mdadm-raid" 
then "/etc/init.d/mdadm-raid start" won't be invoked at boot.

Regards,
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