Older blog entries for mbanck (starting at number 27)

My Thinkpad's harddisk started to spew out errors in early December, and it took me some time to, ehm, update my backups and get a new harddisk shipped. When the new disk finally arrived, I decided to install Ubuntu on it; partly due to a Warty CD being a bit easier to reach than a Debian one, partly because I don't like having to remove all the KDE applications after doing a Sarge desktop install.

Over the last couple of months, I became co-maintainer of some packages, namely exult (an Ultima7 game engine, I have since taken over maintainership completely), sbuild (the version in the archive directed for end users), crosshurd (a hackish way to bootstrap a Debian system (Linux, BSD or Hurd) using parts of debootstrap and apt-get) and perhaps most notably the hurd package itself. Since I started my Ph.D. in November, I had to cut down on time devoted to Debian and mostly looked after the hurd package. The most important change here was the inclusion of Ognyan Kulev's patch for large stores, finally killing off the legendary 2 GB partition limit.

Upstream Hurd development continues to be very seasonal. Thomas and Roland have mostly disappeared again, but Marcus and Neal are now working on the L4 port with increased energy and the progress they make is awesome. First, Neal finished the initial memory management framework. A short while later, Marcus reported the first successful execution of a user-space program on Hurd/L4. Marco mostly focused on Grub2 over the last months but lately came back and finished the console repeaters and the Hurd part of DHCP support.

However, there have been a lot of new people getting involved both in Debian GNU/Hurd and the Hurd/L4 port, together with the Hurdfr project getting more active recently. A constant flux of incoming patches and some duplication of work resulting from this forced us to turn on the patch tracker of the pkg-hurd alioth project. Likewise, the hurd-l4 mailing list has seen a couple of new faces, most notably Matthieu Lemerre (who already sent in a bunch of useful patches) and Johan Rydberg (who has been active in the Hurd community for several years and now got commit rights to the Hurd/L4 source). Also, Andrew Resch managed to boot into the Hurd from a CD via GRUB and Ben Asselstine even got it booting all the way into the Hurd console and multi-user mode. This is an important step on the way to a native installer.

The Debian GNU/Hurd port is currently pretty well off, we have a stable toolchain and noticably increased the user experience lately as mentioned above. However, the sarge release is more and more becoming annoying for us, as important packages like coreutils or krb4/krb5 (which are needed for openldap and thus a lot of other stuff) are not getting fixed for us. Last week, I spent two nights fixing xfree86 for GNU/Hurd, but the patches did not get considered for the latest upload, which is pretty demotivating. Besides this, the next steps are probably looking at debootstrap and later debian-installer and then porting GNOME.

After having been demotivated to help on the sarge release due to the lack of progress on testing-security over summer, I got back into bug fixing in autumn when I had the feeling that the ftp-masters and buildd wizards were creeping back out of their holes and some slow progress was being made. I attended the Bug-Squashing Party in Frankfurt in late November, driving there together with Andreas Barth and meeting Frank Lichtenheld, Wesley Terpstra, Norbert Tretkowski and others. I took a look at RC bugs for the first time in 6 months and managed to fix quite a few. The connection between release progress and my bug-fixing motivation occured to me only afterwards, I wonder how many other Debian people were sub-conciously putting off fixing bugs due to being frustrated by the release process. The total lack of attendence at the spring Bug-Squashing-Parties on IRC suggest there are quite a few, so I was really happy to see people from the UK and Australia participate as well.

Next stop: FOSDEM.

Linux World Expo

After Systems, I spent a couple of days with my parents in Frankfurt and seized the opportunity to visit Linux World Expo last Tuesday and Wednesday. I was rather late on Tuesday and arrived at the Messe around 4:30 PM. The Debian booth was quite bigger than the one at Systems and professionally setup by Jörg Jaspert and Alexander Schmehl with our shiny merchandise display cylinder and a couple of impressive workstations (including one from Sun) as well as a small FAI part. The booth was manned by enough people, so I decided to have a stroll over the expo area, after greeting Chris Halls and Jesus Climent, who I was delighted to see again. IBM, Sun, HP and Novell (again, no GNOME desktops could be seen) had big booths, SAP and RedHat somewhat smaller ones.

I had a long and nice discussion with the two people from the C&L booth (the printing house which provided our booth at Systems), and they said that Systems seems to be interested in having a much bigger FLOSS area for next year, hopefully including the GNOME, Mozilla, Apache projects besides many others. This year, the FLOSS area was a bit hurried, but hopefully it will bigger, better and more shiny next year.

I also had some chats with a guy from IBM and another guy from Univention about commercial Debian support, which seems to be getting better and better in Germany. The Univention people seem to be able to power large installations. Of course, the IBM guy said they are not going to advertise Debian support, but the general rule these days seems to be: "If customers ask for Debian, we do support".

After the expo has ended we had dinner in an Indian restaurant. Michael Meskes, Jörg Jaspert Alexander Schmehl, Chris Halls, Thomas Lange and a couple of others were present and it the food was very good (albeit too much and quite expensive). Michael and Chris also took this dinner as an occasion to celebrate the start of their UK branch, Credativ ltd. Afterwards everybody left, so I decided to go home as well and had an interesting disussion about Ubuntu, Canonical and Debian with Chris while waiting for the train.

On Wednesday, I was unfortunately very late for Mark Shuttleworth's keynote. I only managed to listen to last five minutes and the Q&A part. However, probably knowing much of the content already, I wanted to attend the keynote mostly to see Mark speak anyway, which I was able to evaluate at least roughly during that time. Mark is a very charismatic speaker who seems to be well experienced in delivering talks. Also, the Q&A session was very enlightening by the way in which he answered, even though not so many questions were asked. After the talk, I had a chat with the present Credativ guys (Andreas Müller (amu), Michael Meskes and Chris Halls) and then went to lunch together with them and Mark in a nearby Pizzeria. Mark is really an interesting guy with a strong vision and nice humour and I can now understand why people would follow him and work with him so well.

Back at the expo, I bumped into Frauke Lehman, a socialogist from Berlin. She wanted to ask a couple of questions about the Debian project and as I was the first one around at the booth, we started a conversation. I think we talked for over an hour; about Debian history (mainly how the current organizational structure came into place), internal Debian mechanisms and communication channels and random other stuff. A very intersting conversation overall.

I needed to get back to Munich later that day, so I had to leave Linux World Expo at around 4:30 PM already. Still, it was a pretty intense event compared to one week of just hanging around the Debian booth at Systems, telling people what Debian is about. I had enough expos for a while now, though.

Debian at Systems 2004

After a two year hiatus, Debian (along other Free Software projects like Skolelinux, KDE, OpenOffice.org and the various BSDs) had a booth again at the Systems expo in Munich, thanks to the C&L publishing house who sponsored the Free Projects Area. The booth was operated by the Munich Debian crowd, namely Jens Schmalzing, Robert Lemmen, Erich Schubert, Michael Ablassmeier, Richard Atterer, Achim Bohnet, Simon Richter and myself. The booth itself was pretty small, only one half of a round table, about one square meter in total, but at least there was some wall space around where we could place one Ayo poster, along with another one right above the table. Unfortunately, our booth was located quite in the background and was not very easily visable from the main conference corridor, so over the days we added some stuff like a sign with a big, A4 sized 'debian' on it and a A0 poster version of the Debian flyer next to the one from Ayo (those Ayo posters are really cool, but they lack a bit in contrast, so they are hard to identify as Debian from far away). As promotion material for passing visitors, we handed out Debian flyers and LinuxTag DVDs (the latter for a voluntary donation, when we felt people would only throw it away eventually anyway) and we sold the above mentioned Ayo posters (quite some people requested T-Shirts as well, though). All the merchandise/marketing material was kindly provided/shipped by Credativ.

Despite NetBSD being around as well, the Debian booth had the coolest piece of hardware, namely a Mac SE/30, running Debian stable on a Linux-2.2 kernel. Jens Schmalzing got it installed and running over the last months, so we were finally able to showcase it. As a general-purpose demonstration/information machine, we gladly accepted a Shuttle XPC box with a pretty big LCD which Shuttle donated to all the free projects. Additionally, my ThinkPad was around most of the time. While the Mac was of course running text mode (debroster most of the time), the other boxes ran the Debian GNOME desktop. For some time, we also demonstrated Debian GNU/Hurd running the XFCE4 desktop on both the Shuttle and the ThinkPad.

Jens Schmalzing and I went to the expo area on Sunday and started building up the booth. However, the Shuttle boxes had not arrived yet, so this was pretty much limited to setting up the SE/30. and depositing the information material in the storage area behind the booth. Systems started for real on Monday and was pretty busy setting up our booth a bit more at the beginning. Some time later, Robert Lemmen arrived and we started to shift our attention to the visitors. Attendence was pretty low Monday morning though, so I started to worry Robert came along for naught. He then invented our guerrilla marketing campaign, moving our presence to the edge of the Free Projects Area, next to the conference corridor. He put a chunk of flyers and two empty DVD covers on the prospect case, stood next to it and started talking to passing expo visitors. This proved very successful, and we were quite busy for the rest of the day (or rather, week). Luckily, Erich Schubert arrived at around noon and had time to install Debian on the Shuttle which were dilivered by then. Once somebody wanted to know something specific or people found out about our booth by theirselves, one of us moved back to the booth. It turned out that if at least one visitor was standing at the booth, more people got interested and stopped by as well.

The rest of the week went pretty smooth, we managed to have at least two guys for almost all the time. There was a quite higher attendence and interest than we (or at least I) projected (and a much higher interest than for the booth right opposite to ours), so we were usually pretty busy answering one guy's answers while two others patiently waited for their turn. The posters sold very well and a lot of people donated some money in exchange for a DVD as well, so collected a good amount of money for Debian. Besides that, it was much fun to man the booth, albeit exhausting. Of course, by far the most frequently asked question was: 'When will Sarge be released?', followed by a small amount of 'what about amd64?' and 'wow, it exists?!?' questions when people saw Debian GNU/Hurd running. The rest of the questions were a variety of more specific ones. It was interesting to note that although Systems is a general-purpose computer expo (and looking around, almost all displayed computers ran Windows), except for very few visitors everybody knew about Linux and considerably more than half of the passing crowd knew about Debian at least from hearsay. Also, a lot of people (probably having read the announcement on the events mailing list or Debian Weekly News) were die-hard Debian users/admins who just came by to say 'good work' or talk about how they use/love/hack Debian. Also, Andreas Barth, Rene Engelhard and Norbert Tretkowski visited us briefly at the booth.

On Tuesday and Thursday, the Debian crowd got together after Systems in the Augustinerkeller right in the heart of Munich. It was quite crowded (eleven people in total) and the mood was really good on Tuesday, the first people arrived at around 7 PM and Achim and I finally left the pub at 11:30 PM after some beers. On Thursday, Jens Schmalzing, Siggi Langauf and me were around (technically, Simon Richter was around as well, but he was busy discussing things in another part of the pub) together with the KDE and Skolelinux guys.

Overall, the Systems was both much for fun and exhausting than I expected, and I hope we will get some new Debian users soon(and maybe even some new Debian GNU/Hurd users, who knows). Thanks to all the people helping with the booth, most notable the non-Debian Developers Robert Lemmen, Achim Bohnet and Michael Ablassmeier. And again a big thanks to C&L for donating the booth in the first place, as well as Credativ for the merchandise and Shuttle for lending their hardware.

The Ubuntu development model

So, everybody says Ubuntu rocks. I tested it a while ago (and my parents now use it) and I can confirm that. Enough praise has been told about the Ubuntu distribution, so thought I would rather write about the Ubuntu project a bit, as this appears to be much more blurry.

It seems Canonical managed to pull off with a tiny workforce what Debian was not able to do with a thousand volunteers. Of course, there is the mythical man month: about three dozen highly skilled and motivated developers working full time on Ubuntu can somewhat compensate for thousand volunteers of which only a tiny fraction care about releasing at all. However, Ubuntu also bravely decided to take new approaches to distribution development (at least compared to Debian) and try fundamentally different ideas, a couple of which were taken from how the GNOME community works.

The following are the key development point I as an interested outsider gathered from reading their website and from following their mailing lists and IRC channels (corrections/additions welcome):

• They have an infrastructure similar to the Debian one. The archive tools seem to be the same, given that their prime authors work for Canonical and they advertise python as their language of choice. They also have build daemons at least for their three supported architectures. They use mailman for their lists and (for now) bugzilla as their BTS though.
• They split the Debian distribtution into 'main' and 'universe', adding additional packages to the former. The 'main' part is their supported set of Free Software, which comprises their base system, their GNOME desktop and their selected servers and console programs. Universe is basically all other Debian packages which happened to build for them. Next to those, they introduced a 'restricted' component which contains firmware and binary-only drivers.
• At least for their first release, they branched unstable around halfway through their release cycle and worked from there. They concentrate on stabilizing and integrating their main packages and only worry about universe when there is time or interest.
• They rebuild the whole archive (including universe) on their build daemons. If needed, they upload new versions for the packages, sometimes many revisions.
• They have a set of rules that says they should be respectful and communicative between each other. Disputes are regulated by their technical board and community council. This warrants a good working climate between the Ubuntu maintainers, which makes Ubuntu fun to work on.
• There is a rigid, time-based release schedule. Not only the release date itself is fixed well in advance, but also every major milestone along the release process.
• As the release draws near, their release managers have to approve all new upstream versions and later on every fix. They also produce several testing CDs in short time intervals.
• Everybody involved can upload any package (as long as the patch gets approved), there is no concept of NMUs (Non-Maintainer-Uploads). More precisely, there is no concept of package maintenance at all, different developers are just loosely appointed to specific parts of the archive, like X, GNOME, etc. Furthermore, they have teams working together concentrating on specific tasks like server, laptop, security, installer, ports, etc.

Especially the last three points make their release management both more flexible and more rigid at the same time compared to Debian's, and they allow for their strict 6-month release cycle.

It remains to be seen how the Ubuntu development evolves. Some interesting questions in this regard, which will only be answered by time:

• Will all of their work flow back upstream? They modified the standard GNOME desktop, the Debian installation and the project-utopia stack a fair bit, along with numerous smaller tweaks. Whether some or all of those ideas will be proposed for inclusion (and accepted) will be seen.
• Will they seriously try to integrate their distribution-wide modifications into the Custom Debian Distributions framework, or will Ubuntu rather become a distribution framework for Custom Ubuntu Distributions themselves?
• Will they branch off unstable again, or will they just resync the untouched packages? They seem to have modified a huge amount of packages and no central source-repository-management (yet?), so branching/merging might be too cumbersome for them and they might just work from their release.
• Will the Canonical employes who are also Debian Developers continue to dedicate some parts of their free time to work on their non-packaging related tasks for Debian, like account/release/archive management?

My answer to all of the above questions was initially 'yes', and I hope this will continue to be the case. But again, only time can tell.

Of course, it also remains to be seen how Debian development evolves. Ubuntu seems to be the first evolutionary challenge to Debian and it will be interesting to see how Debian adapts to it. It is already clear that Ubuntu will be good for Free Software in general and the Linux desktop in particular, no matter what happens.

I am going to start my Ph.D. next month (well, in case I find a new flat in Munich until then), so I decided to do some Debian hacking while I still have some time. I finally managed to build and upload untampered hurd-i386 xfree86 packages for the first time in history, this should make it much easier to build other packages now. Jeff Bailey said he would restart the Hurd buildd in the near future, so the port should start rolling big time again soon. I also assembled and uploaded a new Hurd package, fixing the permissions problems invoked by the switch to cdbs and adding Marco Gerard's keyboard and mouse repeaters.

Besides that, I also announced a new Debian GNU/Hurd base tarball for xattr-hurd-enabled Linux kernels. Grab the kernel-image or use the kernel-patch, extract the tarball with star, adjust grub and boot into a functional GNU Hurd. It was never easier to get it than now!. The gory details are still here. Somewhat relatedly, Philip Charles has released the K7 series of the Debian GNU/Hurd ISOs.

On the OpenBabel front, I implemented Turbomol support some time ago. I would like to work more on OpenBabel, but Geoff apparently is going to merge the new conversion framework soon, which will result in some shaking. Otherwise, I also cannot get off my ass. I really think OpenBabel should extent to being a base for other chemical applications like ghemical or gchempaint. Those currently use OpenBabel only for import/export of files and then transfer the structure data to their own internal representation. Interaction between the different programs would be much easier if a common ground was used.

I've spent last week in Frankfurt. My parents weren't at home for the most part of it, so I had a pretty relaxing time with my notebook hooked up to our DSL/WLAN router sitting in front of the TV watching the olympic games or outside in our garden, while I abused my parent's P4 box as build machine. After I managed to build GNU Mach with Alfred's NIC-update, I was even able to SSH into it while it ran Debian GNU/Hurd. I finally managed to build glibc for hurd-i386, it took a ext2fs server compiled with a glibc from CVS to circumvent the nasty linkref bug. I also built new binutils and gcc-3.3/3.4 packages, getting the hurd-i386 toolchain back on track. It seems the only thing missing is an update of the hurd package itself, switching the kick-ass Hurd console on by default. Then, the K7 set should be able to go gold.

On Saturday, I passed by the real-life Debian Bug-Squashing-Party, meeting a couple of friends there, most notably Frank Lichtenheld and Peter de Shrijver. The party took place at the Lichtwiese in Darmstadt, the place I passed my first two years of studies in the last 90s. Well, I was not able (or perhaps motivated?) to squash bugs a lot, but just hanging out there during the barbecue was fun enough. Unfortunately, I forgot the AC adapter for my Thinkpad, so I was more or less forced to leave the party at around 2 AM. Many thanks to Martin Zobel-Helas and the others for organizing it.

I also finally did some non-Debian hacking again, adding Turbomole file format support to OpenBabel (CVS commit pending) and hacking on the libghemical autotools setup. It was nice to see that some guys from the University of Iowa are working on ghemical as well, they try to interface it better with the GAMESS software package. However, I believe that support for electron densities and vibrational frequencies should really be included in OpenBabel and hooked into ghemical from there.

So it's been over two months now that I finished my master thesis and am not working at the university anymore. Since then, I did two presentations on the topic of Free Software. One as an introduction to Linux and Free Software in general at my student's association (in german), the other at LinuxTag about the Debian GNU/Hurd port. Both went fairly well, but could have been better.

The rest of the time since early June I spent hanging around mostly. Before LinuxTag, I ported xfce4 to GNU/Hurd, trying to get the port some eye-candy. Afterwards, I mainly concentrated on making sure glibc is fine and updating the xfree86 port for Debian GNU/Hurd, which got finally merged in late July and should be a major leap forward. In early August, I announced a new tarball-based cross-install method for Debian GNU/Hurd which is based on Roland McGrath's xattr-hurd patches for ext2. Unfortunately, it does seem to be too late to get the patches into sarge, either via upstream or via the Debian package. However, Philip Charles has mentioned that he will use this method for the next major round of the Debian GNU/Hurd installation CDs. Elsewhere in the Hurd world, the big news is that Neal Walfied has picked up hacking on the Hurd again and started to review Ognyan's patch for large ext2 partitions (which seems to be getting pretty stable, I compiled xfree86 and glibc several times without major problems). Also, Marco Gerards is still working on integrating the Hurd console and X11 writing a keyboard repeater and he also started looking at DHCP support.

For the non-Hurd related Debian stuff, I mostly picked up my work as Application Manager again (though not as thoroughly as I'd like to) and did some work as sponsor for micah, gravity, ajmitch, jdub (though I managed to mess up his package) and daf. Over the last couple of days, I found the time to get my own packages in shape for sarge... again. Further, I had some more free time to (re)subscribe to a couple of mailing lists like -vote, -project and -devel. However, I decided not to take the pain of subscribing to debian-devel and rather went for the GNOME devel list, which has much more interesting, inspiring and on-topic posts than its Debian counterpart, at least in my opinion.

LinuxTag was a blast. I went there on Wednesday afternoon, quickly walked over the expo, noticed that no GNOME desktop was being displayed at the Novell/SuSE booth and that the Gentoo booth was sort of at the end of the world. I had the expression that the overall expo area had grown since last year, it always took me quite some time to find my way back to the Debian booth. Unfortunately, the hacking area this year was pretty, uhm, limited. On the other hand, the Debian booth was very nice this year. Highlight was a very slick 2m height case where all the merchandise was displayed. The whole booth was very well done as well and looked more professional than last year. Time was quite advanced, so I desperately tried to find somebody to watch the football game (Germany versus Czech Republic) with. Most of the Debian crowd did not seem to be particulary interested, so I decided to stick with the Credativ guys like Noel, Andreas and Michael. However, we walked across half the town looking for some greek restaurant, only to find out it was the wrong one. We finally settled for an italian restaurant just next to the LinuxTag area where I watched the first half of the game. I could not watch the second half though, as I promised to fetch our fearless leader from the Ryanair airport. When we came to the AKK (the gym hall we all slept at), we had a beer and I worked on my talk until around 3 AM. With some guys snoring, I had a hard time falling asleep and I woke up again around 7 AM when the first over-motivated people decided it was time to get ready for another day LinuxTag, sigh.

My talk on Thursday about the Debian GNU/Hurd port went okayish. I delivered it in german, which perhaps blocked me a bit as I had to translate a couple of terms on the fly and had the feeling of repeating myself without need a couple of times. However, interest was pretty high and there were quite a couple of questions, which encouraged me. Unfortunately, magicpoint did not want to run on my Debian GNU/Hurd installation this year and I did not have enough time to debug it, so I had to give the talk on GNU/Linux. After my talk I relaxed a bit and walked around the area. I missed the demonstration against software patents, Martin and me had lunch and went shopping in the city center. In the evening, the famous KaLUG party took place. I have to admit that I liked the setup last year better, at some distance to the AKK, where people sat down in the grass. Instead, the location was right next to the AKK this year, in the same place we used to hang out each night and morning. The people were quite cool though, I had some discussions with Martin, Frank and some others about the general way Debian is heading. I wisely drank a couple of beers this time, so I had less problems falling asleep than the night before.

On Friday I first attended Wolfgang's talk about GNU/Hurd and later Ian Murdock's keynote. I spent the rest of the day hanging around at the front or behind the back of the Debian booth, checking how Huedi, Flo and the others were doing at the hacking contest walking around LinuxTag with Martin and talking to Wolfgang at the FSFEurope booth. I also met Murray Cumming for the first time ever at the GNOME booth (which was right next to the Gentoo booth, I overlooked it on Wednesday) and had a nice conversation with him. He lives very close to me in Munich, so I thought it was funny to meet him at Karlsruhe. Luckily, I could convince Martin to take the Bus back to the airport, so I could attend the social event, which rocked big time this year. Dogi finally arrived while we were waiting for the bus to bring us to the social event location, a lido just outside of Karlsruhe. Apparently, we were lucky to be on one of the first buses, as we did not have to queue up insane amounts of time to get food at the (wonderful) buffet, compared to the people who arrived late. I hang around with the tyrolian Debian section, including Peter, Dogi and Huedi. Later on, I had a long discussion with Andreas about various topics including Gnoppix, and I watched the game France versus Greece together with the others (Funnily enough, I noted later on that the notebook which did the TV presentation was powered by WindowsXP). Some time later on, I bumped into Chris Halls, and we talked a bit about what he's doing in real life and for Debian. I always found it very impressive that he and Rene seem to manage the whole OpenOffice.org stuff in Debian mostly on their own. When I came back to the AKK, I found out that Dogi and the others were still outside, so we emptied the bottle of Bacardi I brought with me, blended with Dogi's orange juice. Florian Lohoff joined us, and told us a couple of hilarious stories on his own, so this was a great night. I guess I was pretty drunk at that point, because I even managed to sleep until close to 9 AM the next morning.

On Saturday I mainly listened to the 'hacking OpenOffice.org' talk by Michael Meeks and partly followed the talk by Georg Greve. I already listened to him last year, so I decided to move on after a couple of minutes (although he is a very inspiring speaker, much more so than RMS in my opinion). In the afternoon, I spent a while talking with Dogi in the beautiful park just outside of the expo area and then walked around the expo for a last time, before I attended the keysigning party However, I have not signed the keys from last years' LinuxTag, but I hope to do better this year. Later on, I discovered very much by accident that Christoph Lameter gave a talk about the performance of embedded systems and I took the oppurtunity to talk to him afterwards and tried to get his opinion on the situation of embedded systems in Debian. While I think that the modularity of the new Debian-Installer and the mainstream advent of Custom Debian Distributions should make for much easier handling of embedded issues, Christoph was not very interested in embedded systems inside of Debian. Rather, he seemed to believe in just sticking a full blown Debian installation on an embedded system (if the resources permit), or otherwise cross-compile something and copy it over. Anyway, I had a nice talk with him and showed him around the Debian booth a bit.

As a summary, I can say LinuxTag was again a nice experience. I only manned the booth for short while this year (as there was not enough space to display and promote the Debian GNU/Hurd port, unfortunately) and rather walked around and talked to people. I met a lot of old friends again and a couple of fine new people, and it is a pity that some others did not show up (mostly mako and Marcus). And of course Joey was too busy for conversation again this year.

I've got a new notebook. Somehow, I managed to get my parents to buy me a Thinkpad R51, after they got me to give my old notebook to my sister so she can write up her Master thesis.

The Thinkpad is extremely slick of course, albeit not extremely small or light. Installing Debian on it was pretty painless, I actually enjoy having a fresh install finally and watching how everything just works. However, it took me a while to figure out how to make exim4 work with GMX and SMTP-Auth and I still haven't figured out how to nicely integrate exim with tsocks, as I am still behind a SOCKS-proxy. Regarding the WLAN, I managed to install the ipw2100 centrino drivers in short time when I finally bothered. It's great to finally see drivers for this available, although they still require firmware.

APM suspend-to-ram is working very well, but I would like to have ACPI to also throttle the CPU and all. Unfortunately, going to ACPI S3 state and back somehow corrupts the WLAN and ethernet drivers, they stop to work after a while. Putting the Thinkpad to sleep and waking it up again makes the drivers work for a bit more. I just hope this gets fixed some day.

Other that that, I'm very happy with my Thinkpad. The keyboard is awesome (although it took me a while to adopt that the Esc key is above F1 now, being a vi junkie) and the display is great. GNOME-2.6 looks more beautiful than ever. Having a state-of-the-art CPU and 512MB RAM also helps a lot when compiling code. The only drawback is that history is repeating, though this time getting the Gigabit NIC working with GNU Mach might be harder. I plan to take the USB-2.0 and FireWire ports into use and buy an external harddisk case so I can take my data more easily with me.

"Sun should do Debian"

That's the private opinion of a couple of Sun people from their blog entries here and here last weekend. Jonathan Schwartz was already quoted in january that Sun would rethink their Linux desktop platform, currently based on SuSE. The question is which platform should Sun adopt instead, and a couple of people seem to push for Debian. The advantages for Sun's JDS would be quite obvious:

• Sun would not depend on another company for their desktop system.
• In contrast to Fedora, Debian is a really stable platform to build on, with a slow and predictible (at least quality-wise) release cycle.
• Sun could gain a significant boost in community acceptance if the adoption of Debian would be done right.
• Debian has always been a good base for others to build on. With the recent boost of development and usability of Custom Debian Distributions, using Debian as a base has become even easier and cleaner. The ideas of Bruce Perens and Ian Murdock are pushing this even further.

But what's in it for Debian? In my opinion, there could be quite a bit, if done right. Companies sometimes seem to be unsure on how they could help Debian. We don't need a lot of money, we've good a pretty good idea on how a Free Software Distribution should work and look like, we've mostly got enough hardware to keep us running (well, thanks to those guys) and we even seem to be getting just enough sponsors to make DebConf rock. But there are areas where we really could need a helping hand. So this is how I think Sun could help Debian:

• They have done a great job helping GNOME's usability efforts. While debian-installer is a huge leap forward in terms of usability from older releases, there is still a lot of possible improvement (let alone for other tools like apt-get/aptitude) and any hint from Sun's professional usability experts would help us tremendously I think.
• Speaking about debian-installer, Sun could perhaps even help in porting it to GTK+/GNOME, something which we plan for after the next release anyway.
• On a lot of 'About' boxes and manuals for the GNOME desktop you find 'Documented by the Sun GNOME documentation team'. Doing documentation is frequently a problem for Free Software projects and there are a lot of loose ends in Debian in this regard as well.
• Sun could also help with thorough testing of the base Debian distribution prior to release. Right now, we mostly rely on end user installation reports, very few developers actually install testing or try upgrading to it. Although we've got a QA team, getting help from professional testers would be very welcome.
• Who knows, perhaps they could even help our sparc port eventually?

All this would of course depend on Sun's level of committment and whether they want to help Debian natively (something Skolelinux is doing with great success) or rather just use Debian as a base and substitute everything that is not there yet with their own (or other's) stuff. The latter would be fine (after all, it's Free Software), but the former would be much more appreciated by the Debian community for sure.

This is all just throwing thoughts together and of course Sun has not made the slightest notion to actually go forth about this officially. But if that should ever happen and if done right this could be profitable (in whatever sense) for both parties and the Free Software Community in general as well. I think Debian should support and welcome Sun in that case, with all due diligence. But in the end, it is our fundamental advantage that we can only profit from other companies' involvements, there is no way to buy us out and then lay off the Hurd freaks afterwards for example.