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.

unburden-home-dir uploaded to Sid //at 02:54 //by abe

Most popular web browsers cause quite a lot of I/O on a user’s home directory and their cache’s also take up quite some disk space – with Google’s Chrome/Chromium you can’t even configure how much disk space should be used for the cache.

This causes unnecessary network traffic and no more makes sense if the home directory itself comes over the network, e.g. via NFS or Samba. And on laptops it spins up the disks and unnecessarily costs battery power and therefore lowers the potential battery life.

Such caches also costs scarce disk space on SSDs or flash cards as common in laptops, netbooks and other mobile devices, and often get backed up without any real use.

To take some of this burden off our NFS servers at work I started to develop an Xsession.d hook which moves off such caches to the local disk and puts in symbolic links instead into the user’s home directory when the user locally logs in.

This hook quickly became a standalone Perl script named unburden-home-dir and the Xsession.d hook just a wrapper around it. Due to some unsolved issues I didn’t feel it’s good enough for Debian Unstable, so I uploaded it just to Debian Experimental back then.

Pietro Abate’s recent blog posting about unburden-home-dir on Planet Debian gave me the right kick to make another try to solve the remaining issues.

And the mental distance gained over the time indeed helped and I could fix the remaining issues. So I added some polish to the package and uploaded it to Debian Unstable.

If you used the previous version from experimental, you have to take care of a few things:

• Previously some configuration files sported unburden_home_dir as base name while others used unburden-home-dir as base name as that’s also the package name. Now all configuration files use the package name, i.e. unburden-home-dir as base name.
• “Conffiles” under /etc/ should be renamed by dpkg automatically, but per-user configuration files ($HOME/.unburden_home_dir and $HOME/.unburden_home_dir_list) must be manually renamed to $HOME/.unburden-home-dir and $HOME/.unburden-home-dir.list.
• By adding UNBURDEN_HOME=yes to $HOME/.unburden-home-dir every user can decide himself if he wants the Xsession.d hook to be used when he logs in under X. On managed workstations with many users this eases testing of unburden-home-dir with just a few users a lot.

You can follow the development of unburden-home-dir also on GitHub and on Gitorious as well as on Ohloh.

Enjoy!

Happy Birthday GNU Screen! //at 23:46 //by abe

According to this Usenet posting, GNU Screen became 25 years old today. (Found via Fefe.)

And no, it’s not dead. In contrary, the reaction on the mailing list to bug fixes with patches is usually impressingly prompt. :-)

I took this occassion and uploaded a current git snapshot of GNU Screen to Debian Experimental.

Bug #644788 (screen 4.1.0 can’t attach to a running or detached screen 4.0.3 session) is still an issue with that snapshot, but gladly upstream seems to work on a solution for it. There’s even talk about a 4.1.0 beta release soon — although that hasn’t happened yet.

Have fun!

Git Snapshot of GNU Screen in Debian Experimental //at 01:09 //by abe

I just uploaded a snapshot of GNU Screen to Debian Experimental. The package (4.1.0~20110819git450e8f3-1) is based on upstream’s HEAD whose most recent commit currently dates to the 19th of August 2011.

While the upload fixes tons of bugs which accumulated over the past two years in Debian’s, Ubuntu’s and upstream’s bug tracker, I don’t yet regard it as suitable for the next stable release (and hence for Debian Unstable) since there’s one not so nice issue about it:

• #644788: screen 4.1.0 can’t attach to a running/detached screen 4.0.3 session

Nevertheless it fixes a lot of open issues (of which the oldest is a wishlist bug report dating back to 1998 :-) and I didn’t want to withhold it from the rest of the Debian community so I uploaded it to Debian Experimental.

Issues closed in Debian Experimental

• #25096: digraph table should be run-time configurable
• #152961: lacks tsl/fsl/dsl caps
• #176626: mini-curses type of interface for screen -r w/ multiple screens? (Fixed by suggesting iselect, screenie or byobu)
• #223320: does not switch mouse mode
• #344759: mishandles xterm control string to set window title
• #353090: please enable the built-in telnet
• #361274: cannot reattach to sessionname if there is another session with similar sessionname
• #450421: please raise MAXWIN to at least 100 (merged with #499273)
• #461107: Requires test -t 0 even when opening a new window on existing screen
• #481411: window created with ‘-d -m’ silently ignores ‘-X exec’
• #488619: Session name string escape
• #496750: screen -d -m and -D -m segfault if setenv given with no value in a configuration file
• #532240: screen with caption SEGVs when resized to 1 line tall
• #541793: “C-a h” (mis)documented twice
• #558724: breaks altscreen
• #560231: Please remove restriction on user/login name length
• #578729: outputs spaces when refreshing/attaching a window with “defbce on”
• #591624: segfault when running “screen -d -m” with “layout save default” in .screenrc
• #603009: Updating the screen Uploaders list
• #612990: /etc/init.d/screen-cleanup: should check for existence of screen binary
• #621704: Fix slow scrolling in vertical splits
• #630535: manpage typo
• #641867: version bump (this bug report sparked the upload :-)

Update: Issues also closed in Debian Experimental, but not (yet) mentioned in the Debian changelog

• #238535: screen lock can no more be bypassed by reattaching.
• #446082: Shows cursor in front of the selected window in “windowlist -b”.
• #522689: Passes signals to programs running inside screen on kfreebsd.
• #526002: Adds focus left/right commands.
• #611453: Documents vertical split in man-page.
• #621804 and #630976: Allows longer $TERM than 20 characters

Issues which will be closed in Ubuntu

• #183849: update to git version of screen
• #315237: crashes with certain options and terminal sizes
• #582153: doesn’t accept login names longer than 20 chars
• #588846: slow when using vertical split
• #702094: Copying and pasting from mutt includes many trailing spaces
• #786292: segfaults if using layout saving with “-D -m”
• #788670: segfault in screen/byobu in natty

Please test the version from Experimental

If you are affected by one of the issues mentioned above, please try the version from Debian Experimental and check if they’re resolved for you, too.

Thanks to all who contributed!

A lot of the fixes have been made or applied upstream by Sadrul Habib Chowdhury who also industriously tagged Debian bug reports as “fixed-upstream”. Thanks!

Thanks also to Brian P Kroth who gave the initial spark to this upload by packaging Fedora 15’s git snapshot for Debian and filing bug although the upload is based on the current HEAD version of GNU Screen as this fixes some more important issues than the snapshot Fedora 15 includes. That way also two patches from Fedora/RedHat’s screen package are included in this upload.

(Co-) Maintainer wanted!

Oh, and if you care about the state of GNU Screen in Debian, I’d really appreciate if you’d join in and contribute to our collab-maint git repository – there are still a lot of issues unresolved and I know that I won’t be able to fix all of them myself. And since Hessophanes unfortunately currently has not enough time for the package, we definitely need more people maintaining this package.

P.S.

Yes, I know about tmux and tried to get some of my setups working with it, too. But I still prefer screen over tmux. :-)

Cool new feature in OpenSSH 5.7: scp between two remote hosts //at 02:55 //by abe

Just a few days after OpenSSH 5.7 was released upstream, our (Debian’s as well as Ubuntu’s) tireless OpenSSH and GRUB maintainer Colin Watson uploaded a first package of OpenSSH 5.7 to Ubuntu Natty and to Debian Experimental.

Besides the obvious new thing, the implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography which promises better speed and shorter keys while staying at the same level of security, one other item of his changelog entry stuck out and caught my attention:

• scp(1): Add a new -3 option to scp: Copies between two remote hosts are transferred through the local host.

That’s something I always wondered why it didn’t “just work”. While it still doesn’t seem to detect such a situation by default, it’s now at least possible to copy stuff from on remote box to another without ugly port forwarding and tunneling hacks.

Further cool stuff in the changelog:

• sftp(1)/sftp-server(8): add a protocol extension to support a hard link operation. It is available through the “ln” command in the client. The old “ln” behaviour of creating a symlink is available using its “-s” option or through the preexisting “symlink” command.

Colin++

New upstream versions of xrootconsole and keynav in Debian Experimental //at 16:45 //by abe

I recently uploaded new upstream versions of two neat small X tools to Debian Experimental:

• xrootconsole displays on a transparent or shaded layer on the root window what it gets as input on STDIN, from a FIFO or from a file, and
• keynav, a way to control your mouse cursor efficiently with the keyboard.

Both packages introduce several new features and I’d be happy if users of these packages in Debian Sid or Debian Sid users curious about them could test the versions in Debian Experimental.

xrootconsole 0.6 + patches

xrootconsole saw no love since 2006 with the last maintainer upload having been in 2002. Nevertheless it never got kicked out of Debian just because of this. The package had been forcibly orphaned just less than a year ago. So it’s no big wonder that this new upstream version I packaged was released already back in 2004. :-)

But besides packaging a new upstream version, bumping Standards-Version and debhelper compatibility, fixing tons of lintian warnings and some bugs, I also added two patches which add new features not (yet) available upstream:

• UTF-8 support: Upstream xrootconsole just drops all bytes where the 8th bit is set which only allows ASCII. Miroslav Jezbera submitted a patch to allow at least displaying localized text containing single byte 8 bit characters as used in all ISO-Latin encodings. Inspired by the patch to add UTF-8 support to ratmenu, I wrote a patch to add UTF-8 support for xrootconsole, too.
• ANSI color support: Last year, Julien Viard de Galbert, who is also active in Debian, posted a patch in his blog to support ANSI colors as produced by many log colorizers like e.g. loco (RIP), colortail, lwatch, or ccze. (Didn’t get colortail and lwatch to work with xrootconsole yet, though.) I included this patch and made it compatible with my UTF-8 support patch. The patch raises the memory consumption per displayed character by one byte, but effectively I just saw an overall memory usage increase of about 25% which seems acceptable.

Of course I informed upstream about these feature patches, but I haven’t got any feedback yet.

But I got feedback from Julien Viard de Galbert, and he’ll join me in packaging xrootconsole as co-maintainer.

keynav 0.20101014.3067

I adopted the Debian package of keynav recently, subscribed to the keynav mailing list (well, it’s a Google group), got a nice welcome mail from the very friendly upstream developer Jordan Sissel who offered to help with any keynav issues.

I told him what features I’d like to see in keynav to fit better the setup where I’m using it. And just a few days later there was a new upstream release including both features I suggested, some more neat new features, and one bug fix. Jordan Sissel writes in the upstream changelog (emphasis and italic text by me):

• Added ‘restart’ command. Makes keynav restart. Useful for binding a key to reload the config.
• Added ‘loadconfig’ command. This lets you include additional config files to load on the command line or in one of the default keynavrc files. (requested by Axel Beckert) … and already in use here.
• keynav will now restart if it receives SIGHUP or SIGUSR1
• Map ‘Enter’ by default to ‘warp,click 1,end’ (requested by Axel Beckert)
• Fix a bug causing the point under the mouse cursor to not click through the keynav window in certain conditions. Reported via mailing list by Eric Van Dewoestine and Krister Svanlund.

Both packages will be reuploaded to Debian Sid (Unstable) after the release of Debian Squeeze (currently “testing”).

Following Bleeding Edge Software and still using Debian Stable //at 23:04 //by abe

Many Linux fans know that Debian Stable usually already lost the “b” when it’s being released. ;-) What seems not so well known (especially not by some DesktopBSD Marketing guy at last year’s LinuxDay.at :-) is that there is really a lot of people who really like this “stale” software collection — because it’s rock solid — especially compared to the ports in FreeBSD or DesktopBSD *evilgrin* which unnecessarily follow every new feature upstream introduces. This is really annoying in a server environment where you want as less changes as possible when updates are necessary due to security issues. My personal favourites here are Samba and CUPS. *grmpf*

Although I belong to those people who run Debian Stable even on brand-new hardware, I sometimes have to use the newest beta or alpha versions of some software to get it even only running. And doing so is fun but feels strange somehow, though. Currently I follow the pre-releases of three software makers quite close, due to a new laptop:

At the beginning of last semester I bought a brand-new Lenovo ThinkPad T61 (2,2 GHz Intel Core2 Duo T7500, 4 GB RAM, 160 GB HD, 1440x900 14” Widescreen) without preinstalled operating system (possible thanks to the ETHZ Neptun Project) and installed — of course — 64-bit Debian Stable on it.

While the Debian Installer from Etch worked fine even on such new hardware, not all features worked out of the box because some components were just too new.

So the first thing I did was installing 2.6.22 from Backports.org, quickly moving farther to vanilla 2.6.23. Nearly everything I needed worked except the wireless network card. It needs the iwlwifi driver which is officially in the Linux kernel starting at the upcoming 2.6.24 (said to be released during the next few days). So I run 2.6.24 pre-releases on the laptop since the first release candidate, always eagerly waiting for either the next RC or the final release. (And 2.6.24 looks impressively stable to me — even since the early release candidates. :-)

I even got the fingerprint reader working for login and sudo (but not xscreensaver) using libthinkfinger backported to Etch from Debian Experimental. I’m just not sure if this is a good idea since the back of the screen already has enough of my fingerprints on it. ;-)

The next software of which I’m currently running an alpha version is 64-bit Opera 9.50 (aka Kestrel, available at snapshot.opera.com) because no earlier Opera version is available for 64-bit Linuxes. Here I had different experiences: The builds from October and November were already quite stable, but since December it crashes usually several times a day.

At work I also run the 64-bit Opera on my workstation, but stalled updating it when I noticed that it became so unstable. So my Opera at work has currently an uptime of nearly four weeks — and would have probably more if I hadn’t rebooted my workstation in Mid-December.

Somehow this hunting for new versions and eagerly waiting for every new (pre-)release makes me really fidgety sometimes. And my understanding for people doing this for there whole userland or even operating system has grown, but I still prefer to have stale but stable software on all my productive machines, even on my laptop — just with some few and handpicked excpetions.

The third but less thrilling thing I’m following are nVidia drivers for X. Since the free nv driver of X.org doesn’t support (and not only just doesn’t know) my graphics card yet and nouveau isn’t ready yet, I run the binary only and closed source driver from nVidia, waiting for that one release which supports Xen since I really would like to run a Xen guest with Debian Unstable for testing purposes and package building on my laptop. Until then I have to content myself with the much more unwieldy QEMU respectively KVM.

Anyway, I’m very happy with the T61 and Debian Stable and can easily connive at the few not (yet) perfect issues like missing Xen support by nVidia, broken ad-hoc mode in the wireless card, no internal card-reader (as announced in the Neptun specifications) and no native serial port.

Some useful links regarding the subject of this post:

• Linux Weather Forecast
• Opera Desktop Team
• Nouveau: Open Source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards
• ThinkWiki

Now playing: Jean Michel Jarre — Rendez-vous à Paris