Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana: Bits from FOSDEM 2023 and 2024
http://phls.com.br/bits-from-fosdem-2023-and-2024
March 4, 2024, 11:50 PM
Intro
Since 2019, I have traveled to Brussels at the beginning of the year to join FOSDEM, considered the largest and most important Free Software event in Europe. The 2024 edition was the fourth in-person edition in a row that I joined (2021 and 2022 did not happen due to COVID-19) and always with the financial help of Debian, which kindly paid my flight tickets after receiving my request asking for help to travel and approved by the Debian leader.
In 2020 I wrote several posts with a very co...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: tinythemes 0.0.2 at CRAN: Maintenance
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/03/04#tinythemes_0.0.2
March 4, 2024, 10:58 PM
A first maintenance of the still fairly new package tinythemes arrived
on CRAN today. tinythemes
provides the theme_ipsum_rc() function from hrbrthemes by Bob Rudis in a zero (added) dependency way. A
simple example is (also available as a demo inside the package)
contrasts the default style (on left) with the one added by this package
(on the right):
This version mostly just updates to the newest releases of ggplot2 as one
must, and takes advantage of Bob’s update to hrbrthemes
yesterday.
Th...
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Colin Watson: Free software activity in January/February 2024
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~cjwatson/blog/activity-2024-02.html
March 4, 2024, 10:39 AM
Two months into my new gig and it’s going
great! Tracking my time has taken a bit of
getting used to, but having something that amounts to a queryable database
of everything I’ve done has also allowed some helpful introspection.
Freexian sponsors up
to 20% of my time on Debian tasks of my choice. In fact I’ve been spending
the bulk of my time on
debusine which is itself
intended to accelerate work on Debian, but more details on that later.
While I contribute to Freexian’s
summaries no...
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Petter Reinholdtsen: RAID status from LSI Megaraid controllers using free software
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/RAID_status_from_LSI_Megaraid_controllers_using_free_software.html
March 3, 2024, 9:40 PM
The last few days I have revisited RAID setup using the LSI
Megaraid controller. These are a family of controllers called PERC by
Dell, and is present in several old PowerEdge servers, and I recently
got my hands on one of these. I had forgotten how to handle this RAID
controller in Debian, so I had to take a peek in the
Debian wiki page
"Linux and Hardware RAID: an administrator's summary" to remember
that kind of software is available to configure and monitor the disks
and controller. I pre...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.1.0 on CRAN: Upstream Fix, Interface Polish
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/03/03#rcpparmadillo_0.12.8.1.0
March 3, 2024, 9:14 PM
Armadillo is a powerful
and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific
computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use,
has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm
development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into
production environments. RcppArmadillo
integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is
widely used by (currently) 1130 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 32.8 million
tim...
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Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in February 2024
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/2024/03/03/foss-activity-in-february-2024.html
March 3, 2024, 7:28 PM
I updated the Linux kernel packages in various Debian suites:

buster: Updated linux-5.10 to the latest security update for
bullseye, and uploaded it, but it still needs to be approved.
bullseye-backports: Updated linux (6.1) to the latest security
update from bullseye, and uploaded it.
bookworm-backports: Updated linux to the current version in
testing, and uploaded it.


I reported a regression in documentation
builds in the Linux 5.10 stable
branch....
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Iustin Pop: New corydalis 2024.9.0 release!
https://k1024.org/posts/2024/2024-03-03-new-corydalis-release/
March 3, 2024, 1:15 PM
Obligatory and misused quote: It’s not dead, Jim!
I’ve kind of dropped by ball lately on organising my own photo
collection, but February was a pretty good month and I managed to
write some more code for
Corydalis, ending up with the
aforementioned new
release.
The release is not a big one, but I did manage to solve one thing that
was annoying me greatly: that lack of ability to play videos inline
in one of the two picture viewing modes (in my preferred mode, in
fact). Now, whether you’re ...
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities Feb 2024
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2024/03/03/floss-activities/
March 3, 2024, 7:52 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
check-all-the-things:
update dep
Debian reportbug:
allow defaults for multi-select menus
Debian release website:
link arch policy from arch qualification
Debian BTS usertags:
fix porter, reproducible, release tags
Debian wiki pages:
attachement:root-system-build.sh,
attachement:root-system-changes.sh,
DebianScience/ROOT,
Games/GameDataPackager,
PortsDocs/New
Issues
Crashes in
ognibuild...
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Ravi Dwivedi: Malaysia Trip
https://ravidwivedi.in/posts/malaysia-trip/
March 2, 2024, 1:59 PM
Last month, I had a trip to Malaysia and Thailand. I stayed for six days in each of the countries. The selection of these countries was due to both of them granting visa-free entry to Indian tourists for some time window. This post covers the Malaysia part and Thailand part will be covered in the next post. If you want to travel to any of these countries in the visa-free time period, I have written all the questions asked during immigration and at airports during this trip here which might be of...
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Guido Günther: Free Software Activities February 2024
https://honk.sigxcpu.org/con/Free_Software_Activities_February_2024.html
March 1, 2024, 5:07 PM
A short status update what happened last month. Work in progress is marked as WiP:
GNOME Calls
Landed support to pick emergency calls numbers based on location (until now Calls picked
the numbers from the SIM card only): Merge Request
Bugfix: Fix dial back - the action mistakenly got disabled in some circumstances:
Merge Request, Issue.
Phosh and Phoc
As this often overlaps I've put them in a common section:
Prepare and release Phosh 0.36.0 and upload to Debian
phoc: Implement always on ...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: Kubuntu: Week 4, Feature Freeze and what comes next.
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kubuntu-week-4-feature-freeze-and-what-comes-next/
March 1, 2024, 4:38 PM
First I would like to give a big congratulations to KDE for a superb KDE 6 mega release While we couldn’t go with 6 on our upcoming LTS release, I do recommend KDE neon if you want to give it a try! I want to say it again, I firmly stand by the Kubuntu Council in the decision to stay with the rock solid Plasma 5 for the 24.04 LTS release. The timing was just to close to feature freeze and the last time we went with the shiny new stuff on an LTS release, it was a nightmare ( KDE 4 anyone? ). S...
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Junichi Uekawa: March.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2024-Mar-1.html.en#2024-Mar-1-22:05:43
March 1, 2024, 1:05 PM
March. Busy days.
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Ravi Dwivedi: Fixing Mobile Data issue on Lineage OS
https://ravidwivedi.in/posts/fix-internet-on-lineage-os/
March 1, 2024, 9:04 AM
I have used Lineage OS on a couple of phones, but I noticed that internet using my mobile data was not working well on it. I am not sure why. This was the case in Xiaomi MI A2 and OnePlus 9 Pro phones. One day I met contrapunctus and they looked at their phone settings and used the same in mine and it worked. So, I am going to write here what worked for me.
The trick is to add an access point.
Go to Settings -> Network Settings -> Your SIM settings -> Access Point Names -> Click on �...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 259 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-259-released/
March 1, 2024, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 259. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Don't error-out with a traceback if we encounter "struct.unpack"-related
errors when parsing .pyc files. (Closes: #1064973)
* Fix compatibility with PyTest 8.0. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#365)
* Don't try and compare rdb_expected_diff on non-GNU systems as %p formatting
can vary. (Re: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#364)
You fi...
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Russell Coker: Links February 2024
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/02/29/links-february-2024/
February 29, 2024, 12:05 PM
In 2018 Charles Stross wrote an insightful blog post Dude You Broke the Future [1]. It covers AI in both fiction and fact and corporations (the real AIs) and the horrifying things they can do right now.
LongNow has an interesting article about the concept of the Magnum Opus [2]. As an aside I’ve been working on SE Linux for 22 years.
Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article about the incentives for enshittification of the Internet and how economic issues and regulations shape that [3].
CCC ha...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppEigen 0.3.4.0.0 on CRAN: New Upstream, At Last
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/02/28#rcppeigen_0.3.4.0.0
February 28, 2024, 10:58 PM
We are thrilled to share that RcppEigen has
now upgraded to Eigen release
3.4.0! The new release 0.3.4.0.0 arrived on CRAN earlier today, and has been
shipped to Debian as well. Eigen is a C++ template library
for linear algebra: matrices, vectors, numerical solvers, and related
algorithms.
This update has been in the works for a full two and a half years! It
all started with a PR #102 by Yixuan bringing the package-local
changes for R integration forward to usptream release 3.4.0. We opened
iss...
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Daniel Lange: Opencollective shutting down
https://daniel-lange.com/archives/186-Opencollective-shutting-down.html
February 28, 2024, 7:45 AM
Update 28.02.2024 19:45 CET: There is now a blog entry at https://blog.opencollective.com/open-collective-official-statement-ocf-dissolution/ trying to discern the legal entities in the Open Collective ecosystem and recommending potential ways forward.
Gee, there is nothing on their blog yet, but I just [28.02.2023 00:07 CET] received this email from Mike Strode, Program Officer at the Open Collective Foundation:
Dear Daniel Lange,
It is with a heavy heart that I'm writing today to inform y...
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Adnan Hodzic: App architecture with reliability in mind: From Kubernetes to Serverless with GCP Cloud Build & Cloud Run
https://foolcontrol.org/?p=4621
February 26, 2024, 8:00 PM
The blog post you’re reading is hosted on a private Kubernetes cluster that runs inside my home. Another workload that’s running on same cluster is...
The post App architecture with reliability in mind: From Kubernetes to Serverless with GCP Cloud Build & Cloud Run appeared first on FoolControl: Phear the penguin....
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Sergio Durigan Junior: Planning to orphan Pagure on Debian
https://blog.sergiodj.net/posts/planning-to-orphan-pagure/
February 26, 2024, 3:23 AM
I have been thinking more and more about orphaning the Pagure Debian
package. I don’t have the time to maintain it properly anymore, and
I have also lost interest in doing so.
What’s Pagure
Pagure is a git forge written entirely in Python using pygit2. It was
almost entirely developed by one person, Pierre-Yves Chibon. He is
(was?) a Red Hat employee and started working on this new git forge
almost 10 years ago because the company wanted to develop something
in-house for Fedora. The soft...
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Freexian Collaborators: Long term support for Samba 4.17
https://www.freexian.com/blog/samba-4.17-lts/
February 26, 2024, 12:00 AM
Freexian is pleased to announce a partnership with
Catalyst to extend
the security support of
Samba 4.17, which is the version packaged in Debian 12 Bookworm. Samba 4.17 will
reach upstream’s end-of-support this upcoming March (2024), and the goal of this
partnership is to extend it until June 2028 (i.e. the end of Debian 12’s
regular security support).
One of the main aspects of this project is that it will also include
support for Samba as Active Directory Domain Controller (AD-DC). Unfort...
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Ben Hutchings: Converted from Pyblosxom to Jekyll
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/2024/02/25/converted-from-pyblosxom-to-jekyll.html
February 25, 2024, 8:55 PM
I’ve been using Pyblosxom here for nearly 17 years, but have become
increasingly dissatisfied with having to write HTML instead of
Markdown.
Today I looked at upgrading my web server and discovered that
Pyblosxom was removed from Debian after Debian 10, presumably because
it wasn’t updated for Python 3.
I keep hearing about Jekyll as a static site generator for blogs, so I
finally investigated how to use that and how to convert my existing
entries. Fortunately it supports both HTML and Ma...
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Russ Allbery: Review: The Fund
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-27694-2.html
February 25, 2024, 3:46 AM
Review: The Fund, by Rob Copeland

Publisher:
St. Martin's Press


Copyright:
2023


ISBN:
1-250-27694-2


Format:
Kindle


Pages:
310

I first became aware of Ray Dalio when either he or his publisher
plastered advertisements for The Principles all over the San
Francisco 4th and King Caltrain station. If I recall correctly, there
were also constant radio commercials; it was a whole thing in 2017. My
brain is very good at tuning o...
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Jacob Adams: AAC and Debian
https://tookmund.com/2024/02/aac-and-debian
February 25, 2024, 12:00 AM
Currently, in a default installation of Debian with the GNOME desktop,
Bluetooth headphones that require the AAC codec1 cannot be used.
As the Debian wiki outlines,
using the AAC codec over Bluetooth, while technically supported by
PipeWire, is explicitly disabled in Debian at this time.
This is because the fdk-aac library needed to enable this support is currently
in the non-free component of the repository, meaning that PipeWire, which
is in the main component, cannot depend on it.
How to Fix...
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Niels Thykier: Language Server for Debian: Spellchecking
https://people.debian.org/~nthykier/blog/2024/language-server-for-debian-spellchecking.html
February 24, 2024, 8:45 AM
This is my third update on writing a language server for Debian packaging files, which
aims at providing a better developer experience for Debian packagers.
Lets go over what have done since the last report.
Semantic token support
I have added support for what the Language Server Protocol (LSP) call semantic tokens. These
are used to provide the editor insights into tokens of interest for users. Allegedly,
this is what editors would use for syntax highlighting as well.
Unfortunately, eglot (ema...
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Scarlett Gately Moore: Kubuntu: Week 3 wrap up, Contest! KDE snaps, Debian uploads.
https://www.scarlettgatelymoore.dev/kubuntu-week-3-wrap-up-contest-kde-snaps-debian-uploads/
February 23, 2024, 11:42 AM
Witch Wells AZ Sunset
It has been a very busy 3 weeks here in Kubuntu!
Kubuntu 22.04.4 LTS has been released and can be downloaded from here: https://kubuntu.org/getkubuntu/
Work done for the upcoming 24.04 LTS release:
Frameworks 5.115 is in proposed waiting for the Qt transition to complete.
Debian merges for Plasma 5.27.10 are done, and I have confirmed there will be another bugfix release on March 6th.
Applications 23.08.5 is being worked on right now.
Added support fo...
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Gunnar Wolf: 10 things software developers should learn about learning
https://gwolf.org/2024/02/10-things-software-developers-should-learn-about-learning.html
February 23, 2024, 1:56 AM
This post is a review for Computing Reviews


for 10 things software developers should learn about learning



, a article
published in Communications of the ACM



As software developers, we understand the detailed workings of the different components of our computer systems. And–probably due to how computers were presented since their appearance as “digital brains” in the 1940s–we sometimes believe w...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 258 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-258-released/
February 23, 2024, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 258. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Use the 7zip package (over p7zip-full) after package transition.
(Closes: #1063559)
* Update debian/tests/control.
[ Vagrant Cascadian ]
* Fix a typo in the package name field (!) within debian/changelog.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Niels Thykier: Expanding on the Language Server (LSP) support for debian/control
https://people.debian.org/~nthykier/blog/2024/expanding-on-the-language-server-support-debian-control.html
February 21, 2024, 10:00 PM
I have spent some more time on improving my language server for debian/control. Today,
I managed to provide the following features:
The X- style prefixes for field names are now understood and handled. This means
the language server now considers XC-Package-Type the same as Package-Type.
More diagnostics:
Fields without values now trigger an error marker
Duplicated fields now trigger an error marker
Fields used in the wrong paragraph now trigger an error marker
Typos in field names or value...
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Niels Thykier: Language Server (LSP) support for debian/control
https://people.debian.org/~nthykier/blog/2024/language-server-support-debian-control.html
February 20, 2024, 3:45 PM
About a month ago, Otto Kekäläinen asked for editor extensions for debian related
files on the debian-devel mailing list. In that thread, I concluded that what we
were missing was a "Language Server" (LSP) for our packaging files.
Last week, I started a prototype for such a LSP for the debian/control file as
a starting point based on the pygls
library. The initial prototype worked and I could do very basic diagnostics plus
completion suggestion for field names.
Current features
I got 4 basic ...
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Niels Thykier: Language Server (LSP) support for debian/control
https://people.debian.org/~nthykier/blog/2024/language-server-support-debian-control-improvements.html
February 20, 2024, 3:45 PM
Work done:
[X] No errors are raised if a field does not have a value.
[X] No errors are raised if a field is duplicated inside a paragraph.
[X] No errors are used if a field is used in the wrong paragraph.
[ ] No spellchecking of the Description field.
[X] No understanding that Foo and X[CBS]-Foo are related. As an example,
XC-Package-Type is completely ignored despite being the old name for Package-Type.
[X] Fixed the on-save trim end of line whitespace. Bug in the server end.
[X] Hover text ...
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Jonathan Dowland: Propaganda — A Secret Wish
https://jmtd.net/log/Propaganda/
February 20, 2024, 9:26 AM
How can I not have done one of these for Propaganda already?
Propaganda/A Secret Wish is criminally underrated. There seem to be a
zillion variants of each track, which keeps completionists busy. Of the
variants of Jewel/Duel/etc., I'm fond of the 03:10, almost instrumental
mix of Jewel; preferring the lyrics to be exclusive to the more radio
friendly Duel (04:42); I don't need them conflating (Jewel 06:21);
but there are further depths I've yet to explore (Do Well cassette mix,
the 20:...
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Matthew Garrett: Debugging an odd inability to stream video
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/69343.html
February 19, 2024, 10:30 PM
We have a cabin out in the forest, and when I say "out in the forest" I mean "in a national forest subject to regulation by the US Forest Service" which means there's an extremely thick book describing the things we're allowed to do and (somewhat longer) not allowed to do. It's also down in the bottom of a valley surrounded by tall trees (the whole "forest" bit). There used to be AT&T copper but all that infrastructure burned down in a big fire back in 2021 and AT&T no longer supply new ...
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Valhalla's Things: Jeans, step one
https://blog.trueelena.org/blog/2024/02/19-jeans_step_one/index.html
February 19, 2024, 12:00 AM
Posted on February 19, 2024


Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear



CW for body size change mentions
Just like the corset, I also needed a new pair of jeans.
Back when my body size changed drastically of course my jeans no longer
fit. While I was waiting for my size to stabilize I kept wearing them
with a somewhat tight belt, but it was ugly and somewhat uncomfortable.
When I had stopped changing a lot I tried to buy new ones in the sa...
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Iustin Pop: New skis ⛷️ , new fun!
https://k1024.org/posts/2024/2024-02-18-new-skis-new-fun/
February 18, 2024, 3:00 PM
As I wrote a bit back, I had a really, really bad fourth quarter
in 2023. As new years approached, and we were getting ready to go on a
ski trip, I wasn’t even sure if and how much I’ll be able to ski.
And I felt so out of it that I didn’t even buy a ski pass for the
whole week, just bought one day to see if a) I still like, and b) my
knee can deal with it. And, of course, it was good.
It was good enough that I ended up skiing the entire week, and my knee
got better during the week. WTH?! ...
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Russell Coker: Release Years
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/02/18/release-years/
February 18, 2024, 4:00 AM
In 2008 I wrote about the idea of having a scheduled release for Debian and other distributions as Mark Shuttleworth had proposed [1]. I still believe that Mark’s original idea for synchronised release dates of Linux distributions (or at least synchronised feature sets) is a good one but unfortunately it didn’t take off.
Having been using Ubuntu a bit recently I’ve found the version numbering system to be really good. Ubuntu version 16.04 was release in April 2016, it’s support ended 5 y...
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James Valleroy: snac2: a minimalist ActivityPub server in Debian
https://jvalleroy.me/wordpress/?p=67
February 17, 2024, 12:58 PM
snac2, currently available in Debian testing and unstable, is described by its upstream as “A simple, minimalistic ActivityPub instance written in portable C.” It provides an ActivityPub server with a bare-bones web interface. It does not use JavaScript or require a database.
Basic forms for creating a new post, or following someone
ActivityPub is the protocol for federated social networks that is implemented by Mastodon, Pleroma, and other similar server software. Federated social net...
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Melissa Wen: Keep an eye out: We are preparing the 2024 Linux Display Next Hackfest!
https://melissawen.github.io/blog/2024/02/16/stay-tuned-display-hackfest-2024
February 16, 2024, 5:25 PM
Igalia is preparing the 2024 Linux Display Next Hackfest and we are thrilled to
announce that this year’s hackfest will take place from May 14th to 16th at our
HQ in A Coruña, Spain.
This unconference-style event aims to bring together the most relevant players
in the Linux display community to tackle current challenges and chart the
future of the display stack.
Key goals for the hackfest include:
Releasing the power of collaboration: We’ll work to remove bottlenecks
and pave the wa...
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David Bremner: Generating ikiwiki markdown from org
https://www.cs.unb.ca/~bremner//blog/posts/org-export-ikiwiki/
February 16, 2024, 4:01 PM
My web pages are (still) in ikiwiki, but lately I have started
authoring things like assignments and lectures in org-mode so that I
can have some literate programming facilities. There is is org-mode
export built-in, but it just exports source blocks as examples
(i.e. unhighlighted verbatim). I added a custom exporter to mark up
source blocks in a way ikiwiki can understand. Luckily this is not too
hard the second time.
(with-eval-after-load "ox-md"
(org-export-define-derived-backend 'ik 'md...
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Mike Gabriel: Debian Edu 12 - Call for Testing
https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/144
February 16, 2024, 7:09 AM
This is a call for testing of Debian Edu based on Debian bookworm. With the Debian 12.5 point release all required packages have landed in the Debian Edu ISO images that allow you to install a Debian Edu system based on Debian 12.
ISO Image Downloads
You can find the Blueray Disc ISO image (use for main server installation) at:
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current/amd64/iso-bd/debian-ed...
For standalone workstation installations or installations on an already up-and-running Debi...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Random Postgres wishlist
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2024-02-13-23-16_random_postgres_wishlist.html
February 13, 2024, 10:16 PM
In no particular order, things it would be neat if Postgres had
(some of these I've implemented myself earlier, though not in
Postgres):
A JIT that is not based on LLVM (using an AOT compiler framework
for JIT is just not a salvagable choice; witness the absolute dearth
of really successful LLVM-based JITs out there).
Interesting orders that understand functional dependencies.
Cross-join correlation statistics.
Better combination of multi-column statistics (the standard way
in academia seems t...
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Arturo Borrero González: Back to the Wikimedia Foundation!
https://ral-arturo.org/2024/02/13/wmf.html
February 13, 2024, 9:30 AM
In October 2023, I departed from the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization
behind well-known projects like Wikipedia and others, to join Spryker.
However, in January 2024 Spryker conducted a round of layoffs reportedly due to budget and business reasons.
I was among those affected, being let go just three months after joining the company.
Fortunately, the Wikimedia Cloud Services team, where I previously worked, was still seeking to backfill my
position, so I reached out to them....
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Matthew Palmer: Not all TLDs are Created Equal
https://www.hezmatt.org/~mpalmer/blog/2024/02/13/not-all-tlds-are-created-equal.html
February 13, 2024, 12:00 AM
In light of the recent cancellation of the queer.af domain registration by the Taliban, the fragile and difficult nature of country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) has once again been comprehensively demonstrated.
Since many people may not be aware of the risks, I thought I’d give a solid explainer of the whole situation, and explain why you should, in general, not have anything to do with domains which are registered under ccTLDs.
Top-level What-Now?
A top-level domain (TLD) is the last par...
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Andrew Cater: Lessons from (and for) colleagues - and, implicitly, how NOT to get on
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2024/02/lessons-from-and-for-colleagues-and.html
February 12, 2024, 10:13 PM
I have had excellent colleagues both at my day job and, especially, in Debian over the last thirty-odd years. Several have attempted to give me good advice - others have been exemplars. People retire: sadly, people die. What impression do you want to leave behind when you leave here?Belatedly, I've come to realise that obduracy, sheer bloody mindedness, force of will and obstinacy will only get you so far. The following began very much as a tongue in cheek private memo to myself a good few years...
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Emanuele Rocca: Enabling Kernel Settings in Debian
https://www.linux.it/~ema/posts/enabling-kernel-settings-in-debian/
February 12, 2024, 7:52 AM
This time it’s about enabling new kernel config options in the official Debian
kernel packages. A few dependencies are needed to run the various scripts used
by the Debian kernel folks, as well as to build the kernel itself:
apt install git gpg python3-debian python3-dacite
apt build-dep linux
With that in place, fetch the linux and kernel-team repos:
git clone --depth 1 https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux
git clone --depth 1 https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/kernel-team
...
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Gunnar Wolf: Heads up! A miniDebConf is approaching in Santa Fe, Argentina
https://gwolf.org/2024/02/heads-up-a-minidebconf-is-approaching-in-santa-f-argentina.html
February 12, 2024, 12:03 AM
I realize it’s a bit late to start publicly organizing this, but… better late
than never 😉 I’m happy some Debian people I have directly contacted have
already expressed interest. So, lets make this public!
For all interested people who are reasonably close to central Argentina, or can
be persuaded to come here in a month’s time… You are all welcome!
It seems I managed to convince my good friend Martín Bayo (some Debian people
will remember him, as he was present in DebConf19 in...
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Freexian Collaborators: Monthly report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2024 (by Roberto C. Sánchez)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-lts-report-2024-01/
February 12, 2024, 12:00 AM
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering.
Debian LTS contributors
In January, 16 contributors have been paid to work on Debian
LTS, their reports are available:
Abhijith PA
did 14.0h (out of 7.0h assigned and 7.0h from previous period).
Bastien Roucariès
did 22.0h (out of 16.0h assigned and 6.0h from previous period).
Ben Hutchings
did 14.5h (out of 8.0h assigned and 16.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 9.5h to the next month.
Chris Lamb
di...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 257 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-257-released/
February 12, 2024, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 257. This version includes the following changes:
[ James Addison ]
* Parse the header and hunksize of diffs strictly before parsing the context
below. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#363)
* Reformat code to comply with the latest version of Black (24.1.1).
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Expand the previous changelog entry to include the CVE number that was
subsequently assigned.
* Bump the miniumum Black requir...
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Marco d'Itri: Extending access to the systemd RuntimeDirectory with a POSIX ACL
https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_468
February 11, 2024, 4:12 PM
inn2 uses ephemeral UNIX domain sockets in /run/news/ to communicate with the ctlinnd program. Since the directory is only writeable by the "news" user, other unprivileged users are not able to use the command.
I solved this by extending the inn2.service systemd unit with a drop-in file which uses setfacl to give access to my user "md" to the RuntimeDirectory created by systemd. This is the content of /etc/systemd/system/inn2.service.d/md-ctlinnd.conf:
[Service]
# innd will change the permissi...
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Freexian Collaborators: Debian Contributions: Upcoming Improvements to Salsa CI, /usr-move, and more! (by Utkarsh Gupta)
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-contributions-01-2024/
February 11, 2024, 12:00 AM
Contributing to Debian
is part of Freexian’s mission. This article
covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this
is made possible by organizations subscribing to our
Long Term Support contracts and
consulting services.
Upcoming Improvements to Salsa CI, by Santiago Ruano Rincón
Santiago started picking up the work made by Outreachy Intern, Enock Kashada (a
big thanks to him!), to solve some long-standing issues in Salsa CI. Currently,
the first job in a Salsa...
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Andrew Cater: Debian point releases - updated media for Bullseye (11.9) and Bookworm (12.5) - 2024-02-10
http://flosslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2024/02/debian-point-releases-updated-media-for.html
February 10, 2024, 10:54 PM
 It's been a LONG day: two point releases in a day takes of the order of twelve or thirteen hours of fairly solid work on behalf of those doing the releases and testing.Thanks firstly to the main Debian release team for all the initial work.Thanks to Isy, RattusRattus, Sledge and egw in Cottenham, smcv and Helen closer to the centre of Cambridge, cacin and others who have dropped in and out of IRC and helped testing. I've been at home but active on IRC - missing the team (and the food) and drin...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in January 2024
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2024/02/my-debian-activities-in-january-2024/
February 9, 2024, 3:23 PM
FTP master
This month I accepted 333 and rejected 31 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 342.
Hooray, I already accepted package number 30000.
The statistic, where I get my numbers from, started in February 2002. Up to now 81694 packages got accepted. Given that I accepted package 20000 in October 2020, would I be able to accept half of the packages that made it through NEW?
Debian LTS
This was my hundred-fifteenth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS...
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Abhijith PA: A new(kind of) phone
https://abhijithpa.me/2024/A-new-phone-kind-of/
February 9, 2024, 10:53 AM
I was using a refurbished Xiaomi Redmi 6 Pro (codename: sakura
I do remember buying this phone to run LineageOS as I found
this model had support. But by the time I bought it (there was a quite
a gap between my research and the actual purchase) lineageOS ended
the suport for this device. The maintainer might’ve ended this port, I
don’t blame them. Its a non rewarding work.
Later I found there is a DotOS custom rom available. I did a week of
test run. There seems lot of bugs and it all...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 256 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-256-released/
February 9, 2024, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 256. This version includes the following changes:
* CVE-2024-25711: Use a determistic name when extracting content from GPG
artifacts instead of trusting the value of gpg's --use-embedded-filenames.
This prevents a potential information disclosure vulnerability that could
have been exploited by providing a specially-crafted GPG file with an
embedded filename of, say, "../../.ssh/id_rsa".
Many thanks...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.0.0 on CRAN: New Upstream, Interface Polish
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2024/02/08#rcpparmadillo_0.12.8.0.0
February 8, 2024, 11:33 PM
Armadillo is a powerful
and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific
computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use,
has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm
development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into
production environments. RcppArmadillo
integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is
widely used by (currently) 1119 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 32.5 million
tim...
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Sven Hoexter: Use GitHub CLI to List all Repository Secrets
http://sven.stormbind.net/blog/posts/misc_gh_get_all_repo_secrets/
February 8, 2024, 10:12 AM
Write it down before I forget about it again:
for x in $(gh api graphql --paginate -f query='query($endCursor:String) { organization(login:"myorg") {
repositories(first: 100, after: $endCursor, isArchived:false) {
pageInfo {
hasNextPage
endCursor
}
nodes {
name
}
}
}
}' --jq '.data.organization.repositories.nodes[].name'); do
secrets=$(gh secret list --json name --jq '.[].name' -R "myorg/${x}" | tr 'n' ','...
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Bits from Debian: DebConf24 Logo Contest Results
https://bits.debian.org/2024/02/debconf24-logo-contest-results.html
February 8, 2024, 5:00 AM
Earlier this month the DebConf team announced the DebConf24 Logo Contest
asking aspiring artists, designers, and contributors to submit an image that
would represent the host city of Busan, the host nation of South Korea, and
promote the next Debian Developer Conference.
The logo contest for DebConf24 received 10
submissions and garnered 354 responses with 3 proposals in particular getting
very close to first place. The winning logo received 88 votes, the 2nd favored
logo received 87 votes, and ...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds at FOSDEM 2024
https://reproducible-builds.org/news/2024/02/08/reproducible-builds-at-fosdem-2024/
February 8, 2024, 12:00 AM
Core Reproducible Builds developer Holger Levsen presented at the main track at FOSDEM on Saturday 3rd February this year in Brussels, Belgium. Titled Reproducible Builds: The First Ten Years…
In this talk Holger ‘h01ger’ Levsen will give an overview about Reproducible Builds: How it started with a small BoF at DebConf13 (and before), then grew from being a Debian effort to something many projects work on together, until in 2021 it was mentioned in an Executive Order of the President o...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in January 2024
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2024-01/
February 7, 2024, 10:16 PM
Welcome to the January 2024 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In these reports we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
“How we executed a critical supply chain attack on PyTorch”
John Stawinski and Adnan Khan published a lengthy blog post detailing how they executed a supply-chain attack against PyTorch, a popular machine learning pla...
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Jonathan Dowland: carbon
https://jmtd.net/log/carbon/
February 7, 2024, 7:24 PM
I got a new work laptop this year: A Thinkpad X1 Carbon (Gen 11). It wasn't the
one I wanted: I'd ordered an X1 Nano, which had a footprint very reminiscent to
me of my beloved x40.
Never mind! The Carbon is lovely. Despite ostensibly the same size as the T470s
it's replacing, it's significantly more portable, and more capable. The two USB-A
ports, as well as the full-size HDMI port, are welcome and useful (over the Nano).
I used to keep notes on setting up Linux on different types of hardware...
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: Montreal's Debian & Stuff - February 2024
https://veronneau.org/montreals-debian-stuff-february-2024.html
February 6, 2024, 7:30 PM
New Year, Same Great People! Our Debian User Group met for the first of our
2024 bi-monthly meetings on February 4th and it was loads of fun. Around
twelve different people made it this time to Koumbit, where the meeting
happened.
As a reminder, our meetings are called "Debian & Stuff" because we want to be
as open as possible and welcome people that want to work on "other stuff" than
Debian.
Here is what we did:
pollo:
tested a laptop that had a defective battery with a known good one (the...
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