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.

PDiffs are still useful //at 03:26 //by abe

… probably just not as default.

I do agree with Richi and with Michael that disabling PDiffs by default gives the big majority of Debian Testing or Unstable users a speedier package list update.

I’m though not sure, if disabling PDiffs by default would

• also have an performance impact on our mirrors — it surely would have a traffic impact on the mirrors;
• really bring a benefit for Debian Stable users as Debian Stable changes seldomly and hence there are not that many PDiffs to download and apply — at least I can’t remember being annoyed by PDiffs anywhere else than on Debian Testing and Debian Unstable. Even the repositories with security updates don’t change that often.

Additionally I want to remind you that PDiffs per se are nothing bad and should be continued to be supported:

• Because there are still areas, even in “civilized” countries, where only small bandwidth is available and where using PDiffs reduces the download time a lot. Yes, also in Germany. BTDT. Only until recently there was no Fibre, no DSL, very bad UTMS reception and otherwise just EDGE at my parents’ home. (LTE was available far too expensive until recently.) And I was very happy about not having to download 30 MB or such just for seeing if there are updates at all, because 25 kB/s was the fastest download rate I could get (peaks, not average).
• Because it seems to be in fashion with big ISP near-to-monoplists, especially in Germany, to cut off your nice bandwidth if you transfer too many Megabytes. Keyword “Drosselkom”. If you happen to be a customer of such a shitty ISP, you may be happy to reduce your traffic amount by using PDiffs instead of downloading the full package list every time.

So yes, disabling PDiffs by default is probably ok, but the feature must be kept available for those who haven’t 100 MBit/s fibre connection into their homes or are sitting just one hop away from the next Debian mirror (like me at work :-).

Oh, and btw., for the very same reasons I’m also a big fan of debdelta which is approximately the same as PDiffs, just not for package lists but for binary packages. Using debdelta I was able to speed up my download rates over EDGE to up to virtual 100 kB/s, i.e. by factor four (depending on the packages). Just imagine a LibreOffice minor update at 15 kB/s average download rate. ;-)

And all these experiences were not made with a high-performance CPU but with the approximately 5 year old Intel Atom processor of my ASUS EeePC 900A. So I used PDiffs and debdelta even despite having a slight performance penalty on applying the diffs and deltas.

Next Debian Meetup in Zurich //at 20:16 //by abe

The first Debian meetup in Zurich last month was quite a success and I look forward to further Debian meetups in Zurich — every first Tuesday of the month.

The next meetup will be

on Tuesday, 2013-Dec-03 starting at 18:30 CET
at St. Gallerhof, Konradstrasse 2, 8005 Zurich

Please note that this is a different location than last month.

Everybody who is interested in Debian is welcome to join us. Registering is not necessary.

There was also some interest in Debian meetups in other Swiss cities, namely Bern and somewhere around Lac Leman. In case you want a Debian meetup elsewhere in Switzerland, too, or if you’re interested in any Debian meetup in Switzerland, feel free to join the Swiss Debian Community Mailing List and help organising other Swiss Debian meetups.

Suggestions for the GNOME Team //at 23:01 //by abe

Thanks to Erich Schubert’s blog posting on Planet Debian I became aware of the 2012 GNOME User Survey at Phoronix.

Like back in 2006 I still use some GNOME applications, so I do consider myself as “GNOME user” in the widest sense and hence I filled out that survey. Additionally I have to live with GNOME 3 as a system administrator of workstations, and that’s some kind of usage, too. ;-)

The last question in the survey was Do you have any comments or suggestions for the GNOME team? — Sure I have. And since I tried to give constructive feedback instead of only ranting, here’s my answer to that question as I submitted it in the survey, too, just spiced up with some hyperlinks and highlighting:

Don’t try to change the users. Give the users more possibilities to change GNOME if they don’t agree with your own preferences and decisions. (The trend to castrate the user was already starting with GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 made that worse IMHO.)

If you really think that you need less configurability because some non-power-users are confused or challenged by too many choices, then please give the other users at least the chance to enable more configuration options. A very good example in that hindsight was Kazehakase (RIP) who offered several user interfaces (novice, intermediate and power user or such). The popular text-mode web browser Lynx does the same, too, btw.

GNOME lost me mostly with the change to GNOME 2. The switch from Galeon 1.2 to 1.3/2.0 was horrible and the later switch to Epiphany made things even worse on the browser side. My short trip to GNOME as desktop environment ended with moving back to FVWM (configurable without tons of clicking, especially after moving to some other computer) and for the browser I moved on to Kazehakase back then. Nowadays I’m living very well with Awesome and Ratpoison as window managers, Conkeror as web browser (which are all very configurable) and a few selected GNOME applications like Liferea (luckily still quite configurable despite I miss Gecko’s about:config since the switch to WebKit), GUCharmap and Gnumeric.

For people switching from Windows I nowadays recommend XFCE or maybe LXDE on low-end computers. I likely would recommend GNOME 2, too, if it still would exist. With regards to MATE I’m skeptical about its persistance and future, but I’m glad it exists as it solves a lot of problems and brings in just a few new ones. Cinnamon as well as SolusOS are based on the current GNOME libraries and are very likely the more persistent projects, but also very likely have the very same multi-head issues we’re all barfing about at work with Ubuntu Precise. (Heck, am I glad that I use Awesome at work, too, and all four screens work perfectly as they did with FVWM before.)

Thanks to Dirk Deimeke for his (German written) pointer to Marcus Moeller’s interview with Ikey Doherty (in German, too) about his Debian-/GNOME-based distribution SolusOS.

The World without a sage web browser? — or — Why Firefox sucks //at 22:57 //by abe

Although I read our Debian’s Joey’s blog posting about not being able to produce Mozilla security updates for Debian, only now, after reading about other Debian’s Joey’s try to fix a security hole in Debian’s Mozilla Firefox, I see how asshole-like the Mozilla Foundation’s security policy looks to Linux (and maybe other operating system’s) distributions, who favour stableness over feature richness.

As many know (or at least were forced to know ;-) I don’t like Firefox, because in spite of all the plugins it can’t cope with all the useful features of Galeon 1.2.x or Opera. That’s the UI point of view.

But from the political (correctness) point of view, we have to ask ourself: What sage browser does the open source world still have?

• Mozilla does not provide security patches, so Firefox, Mozilla (RIP), Epiphany and Galeon are no more acceptable for distribution use.
• Konqueror has planed to drop KHTML in favor of Mozillas Gecko. So see above.
• Dillo’s rendering engine is fast but not really state of the art. Same counts for glinks (aka “links -g”).
• Lynx, links and w3m somehow don’t count since the distributions (and sometimes, me too ;-) primarily need a graphical web browser.

But back to usaility: I heard from quite a few people — even open source people — evaluating or even already using Opera as an alternative, because there is no sage open source web browser, even if you don’t count Mozillas security policy. And I can understand them. If Galeon wouldn’t exist, I probably would be a convinced Opera on Debian user myself, although Opera is closed source. But I and many more can’t live without a working and sage web browser.

The only thing, I don’t like with Opera is that this company seems to be (or at least was a few years ago) very chaotic and uncoordinated. (And I really wonder, how they are able to produce such impressive software.) But that’s another story…

Emacs Macros: Repeat on Steroids //at 16:06 //by abe

vi users have their . (dot) redo command for repeating the last command. The article Repeating Commands in Emacs in Mickey Petersen’s blog Mastering Emacs explained Emacs’ equivalent for that, namely the command repeat, by default bound to C-x z.

I though seldomly use it as I mostly have to repeat a chain of commands. What I use are so called Keyboard Macros.

For example for the CVE-2011-3192 vulnerability in Apache I added a line like Include /etc/apache2/sites-common/CVE-2011-3192.conf to all VirtualHosts.

So I started Emacs with all the relevant files: grep CVE-2011-3192 -l /etc/apache2/sites-available/*[^~] | xargs emacs &

To remove those “Include” lines again M-x flush-lines is probably the easiest way in Emacs. So for every file I had to call flush-lines with always the same parameter, save the buffer and then close the file or — in Emacsish — “kill” the buffer.

So while working on the first file I recorded my doing as a keyboard macro:

C-x (

Start recording

M-x flush-lines<Enter>CVE-2011-3192<Enter>

flush all lines which contain the string “CVE-2011-3192”

C-x C-s

save the current buffer

C-x C-k<Enter>

kill the current buffer, i.e. close the file

C-x )

Stop recording

Then I just had to call the saved macro with C-x e. It flushed all lines, saved the changes and switched to the next remaining file by closing the current file with three key-strokes. And to make it even easier, from the second occasion on I only had to press e to call the macro directly again. So I just pressed e for a bunch of time and had all files edited. (In this case I used git diff afterwards to check that I didn’t wreck anything by half-automating my editing. :-)

Of course there are other ways to do this, too, e.g. use sed or so, but I still think it’s a neat example for showing the power of keyboard macros in Emacs. More things you can do with Emacs Keyboard Macros are described in the EmacsWiki entry Keyboard Macros.

And if you still miss vi’s . command in Emacs, you can use the dot-mode, an Emacs mode currently maintained by Robert Wyrick which more or less automatically defines keyboard macros and lets you call them with C-..

Useful but Unknown Unix Tools: Kill all processes of a user //at 22:15 //by abe

I already got mails like “What a pity that your nice blog posting series ended”. No, it didn’t end. As announced, I knew that I won’t be able to keep up a daily schedule. It worked as long as I had already written the postings in advanced. But in the end the last postings were already written just in time and then I ran out of leisure and muse for a time. But as I said: It didn’t end, it will be continued. And this is the next such posting.

Oh, and for those who tell me further tools, I should blog about: I appreciate that, especially because that way I also hear about tools I didn’t know about. But why just telling me and not blogging yourself about it? :-) At least those whose blog is part of Planet Debian or Planet Symlink anyway really should do this themselves. I’d really like to see also others writing about cool tools. I neither have a right on the idea nor on the name of this series (call it meme if you want :-), so please go on and publish your favourite tools in a blog posting, too. :-)

And for all those who want to join me and Myon blogging about cool Unix tools, independent if listed on Planet Debian or Planet Symlink, I encourage you to offer a separate feed for this kind of postings and join us on Planet Commandline.

Anyway, here’s the next such posting:

As system administrator you often have the case that you have to kill all processes of one user, e.g. if a daemon didn’t properly shut down itself or amok running leftovers of a GUI session.

Many use pkill -SIGNAL -u user from the procps package or killall -SIGNAL -u user from the psmisc package for it. But that’s a) quite cumbersome to type and b) is there a chance to forget about the -u and then bad things may happen, especially with pkill’s default substring match, so I prefer another tool with a more explicit name:

slay

slay has an easy to remember name (at least for BOFHs ;-) which is even quicker to type (alternating one character with the left and the right hand, at least on US layout keyboards) than “pkill” (all characters to type with the right hand), and has the same easy to remember commandline syntax like kill itself:

slay -SIGNAL user [user …]

But beware, slay is…

… not only for BOFHs, but also from a BOFH

It has a “mean mode” which is activated by default. With mean mode on, it won’t kill the given user but the user who called the program if it is invoked as an ordinary user without root rights. *g*

Interestingly I never ran into this issue despite I use this program often and for many years now.

But some Ubuntu users did, probably because adding a sudo in front of some command is easier to forget than doing an ssh root@localhost or su - beforehand. They even seem to be so desperate about it that they forwarded the issue from Launchpad to the Debian Bug Tracking System. ;-)

But to be honest — even if I was very amused about those bug reports — isn’t this issue “grave”, as it causes very likely (unexpected) data loss?

Now playing: Monzy — kill dash nine (… and your process is mine ;-)