Conkeror in the Debian NEW queue //at 21:39 //by abe

I already mentioned a few times in the blog that I’m working on a Debian package of the Conkeror web browser. And now, after a lot of fine-tuning (and I still further new ideas how to improve the package ;-) Conkeror is finally in the NEW queue and hopefully will hit unstable in a few days. (Update Thursday, 03-Jul-2008, 18:13 CEST: The package has been accepted by Jörg and should be included on most architectures in tonight’s updates.)

Those who could hardly await it can fetch Conkeror .debs from http://noone.org/debian/. The conkeror package itself is a non-architecture specific package (but needs xulrunner-1.9 to be available), and its small C-written helper program spawn-process-helper is available as package conkeror-spawn-process-helper for i386, amd64, sparc, alpha, powerpc, kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64. There are no backported packages for Etch available, though, since I don’t know of anyone yet, who has successfully backported xulrunner-1.9 to Etch.

Interestingly the interest in Conkeror seems to have risen in the Debian community independently of its Debian packaging. Luca Capello, who sponsored the upload of my Conkeror package, pointed me to two blog post on Planet Debian, written by people being fed up with Firefox 3 already and are looking for a more lean, but still Gecko based web browser: Decklin Foster is fed up with Firefox’ -eh- Iceweasel’s arrogance and MJ Ray is fed up with Firefox 3 and its SSL problems.

Since my previously favourited Gecko based web browser Kazehakase never became really stable but instead became slow and leaking memory (and therefore not much better than Firefox 2), I can imagine that it’s no more an candidate for people seaking for a lean and fast web browser.

Conkeror has some “strange” concepts of which the primary one is that it looks and feels like Emacs:

• The current location is shown in a status bar below the website, where Emacs usually shows buffer names. All input, even entering new URLs to go to, is done via the mini-buffer, an input line below the status bar.

• Instead of tabs it uses Emacs’ concept of buffers. So no tab bar clutter and though easy access to all currently open pages.

• It has no buttons, menu-bar or such. And except the status bar and mini-buffer, it uses the whole size of the window for the displayed web page. This is the main reason why I prefer Conkeror on the 7” EeePC: I don’t want to waste any pixels for buttons or menu bars and still have a fully functional web browser.

• It of course has Emacs alike keybindings (with a slight touch of Lynx). While this may seem awkward for the vi world (Hey, they have the vimperator^*, also in Debian since a few days!), as an Emacs user you just have to remember that you web browser now also expects to be treated like an Emacs. It just works:

  C-x C-c

  Exit Emacs -eh- Conkeror

  C-x C-f

  Open File -eh- web page in new buffer

  C-x C-b

  Change to some other tab -eh- buffer

  C-x C-v

  Replace web page in this buffer and use the current URL as start for entering the new one

  C-x 5 2

  Open new frame -eh- window

  C-x 5 0

  Close current frame -eh- window

  C-x k

  Close tab, -eh- kill buffer

  C-h i

  Documentation

  C-s

  Incremental search forward

  C-r

  Incremental search backward

  C-g

  Stop

  l

  Go back (Think info-mode)

  g

  Go to (Open web page in this buffer)

  (Hehe, I like the faces of vi users having read these keybindings and now wondering how to remember them. SCNR. Well, sometimes vi key bindings are a mystery to me, too. :-)

  There are of course many more and nearly all are the same as in Emacs, even the universal argument C-u and the M-x command-line are there. E.g. C-u g lets you open a web page in a new buffer, too.

• Conkeror also has very promising concept for following and copying links with the keyboard only. Opera is very inefficient here since you have to jump from link to link to get to the one you want. In Conkeror you just press f for following or c for copying links and then all links on the currently shown part of the page show a small number attached to it. Then you just enter the number (and additionally press enter if the number is ambigous) and the link is either opened or copied to the clipboard.

  A funny anecdote about how this concept grew over the time: Early versions of Conkeror (back in the days when it just was a Firefox externsion as vimperator) numbered all links on the page, not only the visible ones. On large pages with many links or buttons (e.g. my blog ;-), this took minutes to complete. The idea to just number the visible links is so simple and important – but someone first needed to have it. :-)

Footnotes

*) I just noticed that there is now also muttator, making Thunderbird look and behave like vim (and probably also mutt), too. Wonder into which e-mail client the Emacs community will convert Thunderbird. GNUS? RMAIL? VM? Wanderslust? What will it be called? Wunderbird? Thunderslust? (SCNRE ;-)

Axel’s Cruftiness Theorem //at 19:20 //by abe

Theorem: If aptitude is used, set to automatically remove unneeded packages and every not willingly installed package is marked auto, the system’s cruftiness is always 0.

Segmentation faulty tree //at 21:28 //by abe

aptitude on Etch just gave me a funny error message:

1/0/0 root@c2:pts/2 21:14:24 [~] # aptitude upgrade 
Reading package lists... Done
Segmentation faulty tree... 87%
2/139/0 root@c2:pts/2 21:14:43 [~] # 

Ctrl-Ms can be nice sometimes…

Group packages by origin in aptitude //at 02:00 //by abe

I always wondered how others recognise non-Debian packages in the aptitude package tree. I also missed the additional priority level in the hierachy well-known from good old dselect.

For the last one, I quickly found out that you can set the priority as subsection — it’s straight forward after you’ve read the documentation: Just add ,priority at the end of the default grouping method for package views under “Options → UI Options” in the aptitude menu.

Getting the origin as given in the Release file of the repository a package originates from is a little bit more difficult. You need to use the pattern() group function with the appropriate search pattern: pattern(~O)

Since already the default default grouping method for package views doesn’t fit into the dialog, I nowadays just edit /etc/apt/apt.conf directly for changes on aptitude’s default grouping method for package views. It now looks like this on several of my machines:

Aptitude::UI {
  Default-Grouping "filter(missing),status,section(subdir,passthrough),pattern(~O),section(topdir),priority";
};

In aptitude this looks like this:

[...]
  --- text - Text processing utilities
  --\ utils - Various system utilities
    --- Debian
    --- Mowgli
    --- volatile.debian.org
  --\ web - Web browsers, servers, proxies, and other tools
    --- Debian
    --- Opera Software ASA
  --\ x11 - The X window system and related software
    --\ Debian
      --- contrib - Programs which depend on software not in Debian
      --\ main - The main Debian archive
        --- Priority optional
        --- Priority extra
      --- non-free - Programs which are not free software
    --- Mowgli
[...]

Unfortunately this doesn’t work with all non-Debian repositories since a few repository maintainer, e.g. those from Emdebian, arrogate to just keep “Debian” as their packages’ origin. This could be solved, if there’s a possibility to group by e.g. repository URL (host and/or path).

Another problem I haven’t solved yet is that grouping by origin does neither work with locally created nor virtual packages nor tasks — probably since all of them lack an origin. Those branches are just empty or don’t even show up anymore with this configuration. I probably have to dig a little bit more in the aptitude documentation to resolve this.

Now playing: E-Rotic — Max don’t have sex with your ex

Goodbye Woody, Welcome Etch //at 00:53 //by abe

It finally happened. I installed Debian Etch on my last Woody box, a 400 MHz Pentium II with 576 MB RAM named gsa which is my home desktop since I bought it at LinuxTag 2003 in Karlsruhe.

And no I didn’t do a dist-upgrade, neither direct no via Sarge. As already planned I removed some no more necessary operating systems from that box and installed Etch on the freed disk space. Woody is still installed on that box in parallel and was recognized perfectly by Etch’s installer.

I took a few hours but also was big fun to go through Etch package list and to decide what to install. Overall the installation of 5 GB of software took about half a day.

In general everything went fine, the only thing I’m yet missing is sound. Etch didn’t seem to recognize my soundcard at all although it’s a well-known brand and defacto standard for many other soundcards: a Creative Labs Soundblaster. Well, the 16-Bit ISA version, needing the full length of the slot. Worked fine under Woody. Well, I hope I’ll get it working again manually.

What on the other hand is really nice with udev hell —eh— hal and all those new automatic bells and whistles: The desktop (well, at least GNOME Nautilus as well as XFCE, but probably also KDE) recognises when I insert a 3.5” floppy into the drive and shows me a nice floppy icon on the desktop. You think, that’s impossible? Floppy drives don’t inform the rest of the system when a floppy has been inserted without you polling the drive every few seconds? Well, USB floppy drives can. And they do. :-)

I still need time to migrate all the old settings from Woody to Etch. I’ll probably stick with FVWM, but perhaps will use the GNOME enabled version. What’s already done is the migration from tcsh to zsh. On all new or dist-upgraded systems after Etch I’ve chosen zsh so with my last Woody installation retiring I’ve also fully migrated to zsh.

So I’ve got now most of my active private boxes running Etch. Only the noone.org web and mail server “sym” (an amd64 box) as well as my 133 MHz ThinkPad “bijou” are still running Sarge, both with 2.6 kernels.

So with switching to Etch on gsa, I also got no more Debian box running a 2.4 kernel. The only 2.4 kernel I run is on my FreeWRT WLAN router named pluriel, which runs 2.4.33.3. But I expect that 2.6.18 will be as stable and long lasting as the famous and rock-solid 2.4.18 from Woody. 18 seems to be Debian’s favourite kernel minor version recently. ;-)

The days of my last running Woody are numbered… //at 23:05 //by abe

As many of the Planet Debian readers know, I bemoan Galeon 1.2 and therefore Woody. For a long time I haven’t found an appropriate browser replacement for Galeon 1.2 in Sarge, so I never switched my home workstation called “gsa” (Pentium II, 400 MHz, 572 MB RAM) to Sarge, since Woody was rockstable and just worked.

Though, after a few Galeon 1.3/2.0 rants, someone pointed me to Kazehakase, which indeed is a fine Galeon 1.2 replacement. But I noticed that Kazehakase in Sarge was in an early stage and the Kazehakase from testing (now Etch) were already much more matured.

So in comparison to Sarge with Etch I won’t have the problem of not having a mature and sage web browser in main. And due to security support for Woody ceased a few months ago and Etch is now declared stable, it’s time to reinstall my last Woody box with Etch.

For that, a repartioning of it’s two hard disks (8 GB and 40 GB) sounds like a good idea and so I had look, what’s on all those partitions where I once had a shot on quite a few Linux distributions and other unix-like operating systems. (Although I was already a big fan of Debian at that time, I wanted to look over my own nose and ordered a few CDs of free operating system at LinISO.de.)

So here’s what I found, never really used and will throw away quite soon:

• RedHat 9
• Mandrake 9.2beta2
• FreeBSD 4.8
• OpenBSD 3.3
• one more, not yet identified (or perhaps even never formatted) Linux partition

That should give enough space for an Etch installation without touching the Woody installation first. Thanks to Venty, I’ve got a DVD drive for that box, so I can install from DVD.

And for toying around with all those other neat and free operating systems nowadays, I’ve got my MicroClient Jr. named “c2”.

The Software Museum inside the Software Museum //at 02:06 //by abe

Most Linuxers know that Debian and most of its users prefer stable software over up-to-date software. So do I, but sometimes this goes a little bit too far, e.g. when I find software which has been compiled years before the first line of Linux kernel code has been written:

C:\>ls +version
GNU ls, Version 1.4.0.2 (compiled Sep 19 1990 12:43:10 for MS-DOS)

C:\>ls -alF gnu\
total 521
drwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou     4096 Mar 26 23:16 ./
drwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou     4096 Mar 26 23:17 ../
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    17868 Sep 19  1990 cat.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    20028 Sep 19  1990 cmp.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    26780 Sep 19  1990 cp.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    17948 Sep 19  1990 cut.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    27138 Sep 24  1990 grep.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    16572 Sep 19  1990 head.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    27756 Sep 19  1990 ls.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    23100 Sep 19  1990 mv.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    19820 Sep 23  1990 rm.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    37644 Sep 19  1990 tac.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    20188 Sep 19  1990 tail.exe*

C:\>

And yes, this looks like DOS. This is FreeDOS (1:0.0.b9r5a-3) inside of dosemu, packaged for Debian 4.0 Etch and installed from the original Debian archives.

BTW, the date looks quite authentic: According to the ChangeLog, Version 1.4 of the GNU Fileutils have been released on the 9th of September 1990. The oldest version of the GNU Fileutils (nowadays coreutils) available on the GNU FTP server is version 3.13 from July 1996, though.

I really wonder how many buffer overflows this version has. And I wonder if there’s really a scenario in which this combination (Debian → dosemu → FreeDOS → GNU fileutils) could be exploited.