Roman Hanhart vermisst //at 00:30 //by abe

Zur Sicherheit auch nochmals an dieser Stelle (eigener Blog-Feed, Planet Symlink):

Roman Hanhart, u.a. die eine Hälfte des Podcasts Deimhart, wird seit Montag, den 8. September 2014 vermisst.

Sachdienliche Hinweise nimmt die Kantonspolizei in Zürich unter Telefon: +41 (0)44 247 22 11 entgegen. Siehe auch die offizielle Vermisstenmeldung.

Neben dem oben verlinkten Blog-Posting von Dirk bei Deimhart, kann man sich zur Suche nach Roman auch via Twitter auf dem Laufenden halten.

Update: Roman wurde gefunden.

GNU Screen 4.2.0 in Debian Experimental //at 20:22 //by abe

About a month ago, on 20th of March, GNU Screen had its 27th anniversary.

A few days ago, Amadeusz Sławiński, GNU Screen’s new primary upstream maintainer, released the status quo of Screen development as version 4.2.0 (probably to distinguish it from all those 4.1.0 labeled development snapshots floating around in most Linux distributions nowadays).

I did something similar and uploaded the status quo of Debian’s screen package in git as 4.1.0~20120320gitdb59704-10 to Debian Sid shortly afterwards. That upload should hit Jessie soon, too, resolving the following two issues also in Testing:

• #740301: proper systemd support – Thanks Josh Triplett for his help!
• #735554: fix for multiuser usage – Thanks Martin von Wittich for spotting this issue!

That way I could decouple these packaging fixes/features from the new upstream release which I uploaded to Debian Experimental for now. Testers for the 4.2.0-1 package are very welcome!

Oh, and by the way, that upstream comment (or ArchLinux’s according announcement) about broken backwards compatibility with attaching to running sessions started with older Screen releases doesn’t affected Debian since that has been fixed in Debian already with the package which is in Wheezy. (Thanks again Julien Cristau for the patch back then!)

While there are bigger long-term plans at upstream, Amadeusz is already working on the next 4.x release (probably named 4.2.1) which will likely incorporate some of the patches floating around in the Linux distributions’ packages. At least SuSE and Debian offered their patches explicitly for upstream inclusion.

So far already two patches found in the Debian packages have been obsoleted by upstream git commits after the 4.2.0 release. Yay!

Updates (8th of May 2014): 4.2.0 in Testing, Upstream released 4.2.1

screen 4.2.0-2 migrated to testing now.

Upstream released 4.2.1 in the meanwhile with most Debian patches applied. Despite being a minor update, it was necessary to bump it’s internal message version, so vanilla 4.2.1 clients can’t connect to vanilla 4.2.0 servers. Accordingly it may take a moment until 4.2.1 hits Debian as I need to sort out some stuff before uploading that version.

Xen: Running a Sid DomU with PyGrub on a Squeeze Dom0 //at 03:07 //by abe

I’m running one Debian Sid and one Jessie (Testing) Xen guest domain on a Debian Squeeze (Oldstable) Xen 4.0 running host server.

Recently I had to reboot one these virtual machines after more than a year of uptime. But the new 3.14 kernel from Debian Experimental didn’t boot. Neither did 3.13 from Debian Unstable. Nor did any other kernel image newer then the 3.5-trunk (from Debian Experimental back than) work.

Everytime pygrub bailed out with this error message:

Error: (2, 'Invalid kernel', 'xc_dom_find_loader: no loader found\n')

(Yes, the parentheses and the “\n” were part of the error message.)

After some searching on the web I found hints that this message may be caused by an unsupported compression type in the kernel image.

And indeed, if I unpack the “vmlinuz” with the extract-vmlinux tool which is part of Linux’ source code (but not yet part of any binary package in Debian), and use the extract file in grub’s menu.lst (which is then read by pygrub) instead, the DomU boots Linux kernel 3.14 again, even on a Squeeze-running Dom0.