Group packages by origin in aptitude //at 00:06 //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

Back from Chemnitz //at 09:50 //by abe

I’m back from Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (CLT) which were really great. The CLT organizers really know how to make an event for the community without forgetting the business people.

So, although Murphy hunted me with forgotten laptop power supplies, forgotten laptop power supply power cords (Thanks for the spare, Venty!), missed trains, late trains, unfitting train schedules, defective mobile phones (Hi Sven! :-), heavy snowing, addictive Play Station Portables and no time for attending a single talk except mine (I’m sorry, blindcoder), I held all three talks as planned — maybe except the duration — and had a lot of fun as expected.

The slides for my commandline beginner’s talk on Sunday were finished the same day at about 2am and are online since then. It was too long, but except the next presenter (Hi Werner!), nobody told me. I even thought that all those people entering the room were late listeners. I just didn’t notice at all that time was flying by so fast, since there was a lot of interesting discussion with and in the audience, something I didn’t expect from a beginners talk.

Thanks to all who already gave feedback to my talks. And thanks to Jens Kühnel and Henrik Heigl with whom I could drive back to Frankfurt.

LUGS-Vortrag für Einsteiger: Die Helfer der Kommandozeile //at 10:16 //by abe

Am nächsten LUGS-Treff (Donnerstag, 1. Juni 2006, 19:15 Uhr, ETH Zürich, HG, Raum E 21) werde ich einen etwa ¾-stündigen Vortrag für Kommandozeilen-Einsteiger halten. Der Vortrag soll einerseits ein wenig die Angst vor der Kommandozeile nehmen (“Kommandozeile ist ganz einfach.”) und andererseits die Gemeinsamkeiten vieler häufig genutzter Kommandozeilenprogramme aufzeigen: “Da ist (einigermaßen) System dahinter.”

Zielgruppe sind Linux-Benutzer, die bisher Linux nur auf der grafischen Oberfläche — sei es mit KDE, GNOME oder XFCE — kennengelernt haben oder sich noch nicht an die Kommandozeile heran getraut haben.

Dementsprechend würde ich mich auch freuen, wenn nicht nur die üblichen Verdächtigen -äh- Gurus selbst kommen würden – die werden an diesem Vortrag nix lernen – sondern diese auch all ihre Geschwister, Eltern, Großeltern, Kinder, Enkel, Freunde, etc. mitbringen würden, denen sie ein Linux oder ein BSD schon immer aufdrängen wollten, aber immer an so Fragen wie »Ich habe mich eingeloggt und sehe nur “linux FAQ) gescheitert sind.

Update 00:31 Uhr: Die vorläufigen Folien zum Vortrag sind online.

Now playing: Eagles — Hotel California via Radio 24

Slides for Berlin and Chemnitz online //at 01:47 //by abe

The slides for my next two shell efficiency talks are now online.

I’ll hold one 1.5h talk on Thursday, 2nd of March, 19:30h at the New Thinking Store in Berlin Mitte. Thanks to Sven Guckes for the idea and for bringing me in contact (again) with New Thinking.

The second will be a 3h workshop on Saturday, 4th of March at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage.

I’ll also hold a short 30min talk for beginners about the “Command line helper” on Sunday, the 5th of March, 10:00h at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. The slides for this talk will follow during this week.

All talks will be held in German.

Update, 12:57h: I’ll travel from Berlin to Chemnitz with the famous LinuxBus and there are still some seats free. So if you plan to come from Berlin to Chemnitz and want us to join, please quickly contact Frank Hofmann <linuxbus@efho.de> for reservation.

New talk proposal, new Linux distribution found //at 01:47 //by abe

After talking with some LinuxTag guys about which kind of talks are still missing for the upcoming LinuxTag, I submitted another proposal for a still only roughly sketched talk: KISS – Keep it simple and stupid, also on the web.

KISS – “Keep it simple and stupid” is an old and successful principle in the Unix world: Small and simple programs, doing only one thing, but they’re doing perfect, fast and reliable. This principle can also work on the web and make webservers or surf terminals out of already discharged computers.

I planned to show “simple” (or at least “simple to use”) tools like Blosxom or the Website Meta Language, a more slim webserver than Apache (e.g. fefe’s fnord or one of the ACME webservers thttpd, mini_httpd or micro_httpd), slim web-browsers (e.g. like Dillo, Opera, glinks, ViewML or Minimo) and one or more Linux distributions optimized for low end PCs. While thinking about low end PCs, usually the following distributions come to my mind: DeLi Linux, fli4l and Debian Woody.

But none of them seems to fit for my talk as perfectly as I would like:

• DeLi Linux is no bad distribution, since it’s designed especially for 386 to Pentium I, but I have some strong disagreements with the maintainer of DeLi Linux, since he sees a very small package list as necessary requirement for a distribution for old PCs. He states that distributions for old PCs “don’t have that many harddisk space” (beyond other, more realistic arguments — but it seemed to be his main argument) while I see a rich package diversity as an quality criteria. (One of the reasons, why I like Debian and dislike Ubuntu.) So I’m not sure if I should present a very raped DeLi Linux to the audience, just to make it fit my needs, although I’m quite curious about his upcoming 0.7 release with the low end, KHTML based ViewML webbrowser. (Apart from me seeing PHP5 and KDE as a big nono on old PCs…)
• Although I still like Debian Woody very much (you know that old story… ;-), it is just too old for making a talk about how to turn old PCs into being usable again. Sarge would be fine, but it was suggested to showcase an easy and fast way to get something ready to run, and I can’t give the auditors a list of all the Debian packages with low resource consumption and therefore usable on low end PCs.
• I haven’t used it yet, but fli4l seems to be very good distribution to turn an old PC into a ISDN or DSL router, even without harddisk. The last time I had a look at fli4l, it used an Apache as (optional) webserver, which wouldn’t fit into my scheme, since I would like to show an alternative to Apache. But as I found out today the recently released version 3.0 of fli4l uses the already mentioned ACME mini_httpd. Cool! They’re on the right way! ;-) Unfortunately it only seems to be used for serving information pages about the fli4l status and not as common webserver. (Please correct me, if this is wrong! I would appreciate it, if I’m wrong at this point. :-)

Since I first read about viewml on the DeLi Linux page, I looked for Debian packages of viewml today. apt-cache search hasn’t found anything on Woody or Sarge and packages.debian.org is still down, so I used Google. I found out,  that there at least was a viewml package in Debian since at least 2001, so I expect, it just didn’t make it to stable.

But I also found this interesting page on a webserver called www.ubuntulite.org. Ubuntu Lite? That sounds very interesting, since I see Ubuntu not as the baddest idea (expect for it’s horribly resource hunger and only offering one package per application by default ;-), but having an Ubuntu derivative prepackaged for low end PCs and with several webbrowsers instead of only Epiphany (and probably Firefox, don’t they?) would be perfect for my purpose.

So I’m currently downloading an Ubuntu Lite ISO and will give it a try on one of my Pentium MMX boxes. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to support Pentium I or AMD K5 since Ubuntu itself only supports i686 and upwards. :-/

But this also means, that it’s no occasion for my Pentium I Compaq LTE 5100 (which I probably will name pony), but currently, after Bartosz’ recent post on Planet Debian, it looks like Debian GNU/kFreeBSD could also be an interesting OS, since it fits all requirements perfectly: Free, Modern, Exotic and all conveniences of Debian. ;-)

Now Playing: Jefferson Starship — We Built This City

Talk proposal for Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2006 accepted //at 01:47 //by abe

My workshop proposal for the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2006 has been accepted last week. But in addition to it, they asked if I can also hold a talk for beginners about the basic command line utilities, since one presenter had to cancel his offer. But nevertheless they wanted such a talk in their schedule. So I’ll also give a short 30 minutes introduction to basic command line utilities as e.g. ls, rm, cp and mv.

Since I heard no contrary statement, I expect the talks to be held in German.

Now playing: Rockapella — Zombie Jamboree

LinuxTag 2006 Slides are online now //at 01:46 //by abe

Just uploaded the slides to my two LinuxTag talks:

• Wiederbelebungsversuche: Debian auf alter Hardware (Debian Day)
• KISS — Keep it small and simple, auch im Web (Practical Linux Forum)

I’ll hold the KISS talk also at FrOSCon, the Free and Open Source Software Conference in the Rhein Sieg Area near Cologne at the end of June. There I’ll also hold my two command line talks: one talk for beginners and one workshop for advanced shell users.