abe@debian.org //at 02:02 //by abe

On Wednesday I got DAM approval and since Saturday late evening I’m officially a Debian Developer. Yay! :-)

My thanks go to

• Christoph Berg (Myon) whom I know for more than a decade since we studied together, and who’s career in Debian was way faster than mine, but who on the other hand probably knows me better than nobody else in Debian — which made him the perfect advocate;
• Bernd Zeimetz (bzed) whom I know from my times at DaLUG and who was the friendliest Application Manager I could imagine — he’s probably also one of the fastest (8 days from application to AM report :-);
• Luca Capello (gismo), who was the most demanding but also most inspiring sponsor I ever had and who became a very good friend after we found each other over my package conkeror.
• Arne Wichmann (Y_Plentyn) for being my first drop-in center for Debian questions (like “can I directly dist-upgrade from 2.0 to 3.0?” :-);
• Martin Zobel-Helas (zobel) who was always encouraging me to continue exploring new sides of Debian;
• Gerfried Fuchs (Rhonda) just for being there (and for being a package maintainer with good relations to upstream ;-);
• my coworkers at the IT Services Group of the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich, who always found new challenges in Debian for me to solve;
• … and all those others who offered to also advocate me (e.g. Otavio Salvador) or sponsored my packages so far (or at least offered to do so), e.g. Alexander Wirt (formorer), Martin F. Krafft (madduck), Robert Jördens (jordens), …

As Bernd cited in his AM report, my earliest activity within the Debian community I can remember was organising the Debian booth at LinuxDay.lu 2003, where I installed Debian 3.0 Woody on my Hamilton Hamstation “hy” (a Sun SparcStation 4 clone).

I wrote my first bugreport in November 2004 (#283365), probably during the Sarge BSP in Frankfurt. And my first Debian package was wikipedia2text, starting to package it August 2005 (ITP #325417).

My only earlier documented interest in the Debian community is subscribing to the lists debian-apache@l.d.o and debian-emacsen@l.d.o in June 2002.

I though remember that I started playing around with Debian 2.0 Hamm, skipping 2.1 (for whatever reasons, I can’t remember), using 2.2 quite regularily and started to dive into with Woody which also ran on my first ThinkPad “bijou”. I installed it over WLAN with just a boot floppy at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. :-)

Anyway, this has led to what it had to lead — to a new Debian Developer. :-)

The first package I uploaded with my newly granted rights was a new conkeror snapshot. This version should work out of the box on Ubuntu again, so that conkeror in Ubuntu should not lag that much behind Debian Sid anymore.

In other News

Since Wednesday I own a Nokia N900 and use it as my primary mobile phone now. Although it’s not as free as the OpenMoko (see two other recent posts by Lucas Nussbaum and by Tollef Fog Heen on Planet Debian) it’s definitely what I hoped the OpenMoko will once become. And even if I can’t run Debian natively on the N900 (yet), it at least has a Debian chroot on it. :-)

A few weeks ago, I took over the organisation of this year’s Debian booth at FOSDEM from Wouter Verhelst who’s busy enough with FOSDEM organisation itself.

Last Monday the organiser of the BSD DevRoom at FOSDEM asked on #mirbsd for talk suggestions and they somehow talked me into giving a talk about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. The slides should show up during the next days on my Debian GNU/kFreeBSD talks page. I hope, I’ll survive that talk despite giving more or less a talk saying “Jehova!”. ;-)

What a week.

Traveling plans for the first half of 2009 //at 16:12 //by abe

Since the time between the years is traditionally family time for me, I never were at the Chaos Communication Congress. So I wasn’t at 25C3 either. All the more I look forward to HAR2009 this summer (13th to 16th of August near Vierhouten in the Netherlands), but also because, for the last three years I always have been in the Netherlands for one week in summer, sailing with friends on the IJsselmeer.

But before HAR2009, there will be a bunch of other events to visit and people to meet in real life:

• I’m looking forward to see @evan, @cemb and many other identicatis in real life at Microblogging Conference ‘09 in Hamburg next week on Friday and Saturday (23rd and 24th of January). Will go there by train.
• Two weeks later there will be FOSDEM in Brussels (7th and 8th of February) where I hopefully will meet Savago from the Amora Project and many other friends from the FOSS community. Will go there either by train or car.
• On 14th and 15th of March, the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage take place. I’ve submitted two talks for beginners and will be there with the usual suspects from Symlink (Venty, dino and P2501 so far). We’ll go there by train.
• Luckily not overlapping with the VCFe this year is the SPEZI at Germersheim near Karlsruhe which takes place on 25th and 26th of April. I plan to go there, maybe by train and Brompton, but nothing yet sure.
• The, one week later over the long weekend around the 1st of May there will be Vintage Computer Festival Europe (VCFe) 10.0 at Munich featuring Raffzahn. Will be there with the usual suspects. I’ll maybe prepare an exhibition (“Debian on dead hardware”, i.e. PowerPC, Sparc, Alpha, etc. or so) or a talk, but not yet sure. Will go there by (vintage) car as usual.

Then there will be the big summer holidays driving around in the middle of Europe with the 2CV and taking part in most likely:

• Sailing with friends from 31st of July to 7th of August,
• HAR2009 one weekend later, and
• FrOSCon at St. Augustin near Bonn another weekend later.

This also means that I’ll probably miss:

• DebConf 9 at Extremadura (Spain) from 16th to 30th of July (can’t get so fast from Spain to neither the Czech Republic nor the Netherlands with the 2CV),
• The 18th International 2CV Meeting at Velebudice, Czech Republic from 28th of July to 2nd of August (overlaps with sailing)-:, and
• Bünzli 18 from 14th to 16th of August at Winterthur, Switzerland (overlaps with HAR2009).

… at least unless one of the other events I plan to visit doesn’t take place as expected or my plans change heavily.

P.S.: Anyone thinks this amount of events justifies a Dopplr account? ;-) Or is there somewhere a free online service similar to Dopplr, but runs software under the GNU Affero General Public License like e.g. identi.ca and many other Laconica instances do for microblogging?

MicroClient Sr. //at 01:16 //by abe

About a year ago, I bought a Norhtec MicroClient Jr., a complete 200 MHz MMX-compatible SoC (“Vortex86”) PC so small that it fits into your hand or onto VESA mountings. Althought thought as thin client, the machine has 128 MB RAM and runs Debian from either netboot, USB stick, CF card or 2.5” harddisk without problems and not even that slow.

Later last year, we needed more MicroClient Jrs. at work and since the MicroClient JrSX had a 300 MHz 486SX-compatible SoC processor (“Vortex86SX”) from MSTi and 128 MB DDR RAM instead of SD RAM, we expected them at least in the same performance range and bought a few for ETH and I also bought one for myself. Well, they were about three times slower, since the FPU is missing, not all programs from Debian Etch work fine, e.g. X doesn’t work without patching and recompiling (with Sid, X works, but not the kernel anymore – Update, 26-Jul-2008: See #454776 for a solution for this problem)…

BTW: I had both machines with me at FOSDEM ‘08 at the Debian booth and the MMX-compatible machine also at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (CLT) at the Symlink booth and in Kurt Gramlich’s talk about ecological computers. So if you saw them there, just imagine the same case, with a twice to three times faster CPU and four times the amount of RAM, but with roughly the same carbon foot-print!

For our thin client purposes at work we now use ALIX boards from PC Engines (Mini-ITX format) with 500 MHz AMD Geode processors. They’re much faster than the MicroClient Jr. and need even less power.

Today, while surfing around on some Mini-ITX shops, I found some computer in obviously MicroClient Jr. case, but with 500 MHz VIA Eden processor and 512 MB of RAM. I first couldn’t believe it. They are selling it as eTC-2500. Since eTC-2300 was one of the brandings of the MicroClient Jr. which is called eBox-2300 officially by the manufacturer DM&P, I searched for eBox-2500, but didn’t find anything useful. Then I looked at the manufacturer’s product page at CompactPC.com.tw and found the eBox-4300 — so it’s really true, they managed to fit a board with 500 MHz VIA processor and half a Gig of RAM into the already fscking small space inside the MicroClient Jr. case, and even without needing more power: Still 15W from the power adaptor. Next stop was Norhtec’s Website. And yes, they also have a new MicroClient product: The MicroClient Sr.. I really need to have one of those for my MicroClient collection! ;-)

Is ikiwiki a Website Meta Language killer? //at 03:03 //by abe

On this year’s Chemitzer Linux-Tage (CLT, engl. “Chemnitz Linux Days’) I attended a few talks of which especially formorer’s ikiwiki talk was very interesting.

I attended his talk since I found out that ikiwiki is command line wiki compiler in contrary to the thousands of solely web based wikis out there. As a big fan of statically generated content this idea sounded very interesting to me.

But just having a short look at ikiwiki’s web page didn’t help to get started and it seemed as if I had not the right idea of how ikiwiki works to get started. So formorer’s talk seemed to be a good possibility to get an idea of how ikiwiki works without much effort.

During the talk I noticed that ikiwiki can many things I do with the Website Meta Language (WML), but can do some more things WML can’t do out of the box:

1. It’s not only a framework to generate web pages, it’s more like a content management system (CMS).
2. Versioning is intergal part of ikiwiki without reinventing the wheel: It works out of the box with — beyond others — Subversion, Git and Mercurical (Hg).

And when formorer showed that even Tobi Oetiker uses ikiwiki, I noticed that ikiwiki probably could be a WML killer, since I knew Tobi as a WML fan. And ikiwiki looks very appealing for the WML fan inside me, too…

OTOH: Intergrating WML as a backend to ikiwiki could be an interesting idea, though.

Hearing what kind of input files ikiwiki can process, I also got the idea of using hnb (Hierachical Notebook) files as input for ikiwiki. hnb files are already XML and so a conversion to XHTML shouldn’t be that hard.

But when searching the web for “ikiwiki hnb” I found the blog postings of a few people switching away from hnb, e.g. to vimoutliner. Since I’m an Emacs addict and don’t like vim very much (if I use a vi, I use nvi or elvis), I searched for “emacs hnb” and indeed found someone who switched from hnb to org-mode – of which I never heard before. Unfortunately org-mode doesn’t seem to be in Debian (Update 00:23: Yeah, yeah, I now know it’s included in emacs22, but emacs22 hasn’t made it into kfreebsd-i386 yet, so I didn’t notice. See the comments. :-) but I’ll play around with it a little bit. Unfortunately a first test wasn’t that promising. But we’ll see.

Now playing: Men at Work — Down Under

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.

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.

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