Antoine Beaupré: NVMe/SSD disk failure
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-05-13-nvme-disk-failure/
May 13, 2022, 8:19 PM
Yesterday, my workstation (curie) was hung when I
came in the office. After a "skinny elephant", the box rebooted,
but it couldn't find the primary disk (in the BIOS). Instead, it
booted on the secondary HDD drive, still running an old Fedora 27
install which somehow survived to this day, possibly because ?BTRFS
is incomprehensible.
Somehow, I blindly accepted the Fedora prompt asking me to upgrade to
Fedora 28, not realizing that:
Fedora is now at release 36, not 28
major upgrades take about...
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Antoine Beaupré: BTRFS notes
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-05-13-brtfs-notes/
May 13, 2022, 8:04 PM
I'm not a fan of BTRFS. This page serves as a reminder of why,
but also a cheat sheet to figure out basic tasks in a BTRFS
environment because those are not obvious to me, even after
repeatedly having to deal with them.
Content warning: there might be mentions of ZFS.
Stability concerns
I'm worried about BTRFS stability, which has been historically
... changing. RAID-5 and RAID-6 are still marked unstable, for
example. It's kind of a lucky guess whether your current kernel will
behave properl...
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Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (March and April 2022)
https://bits.debian.org/2022/05/new-developers-2022-04.html
May 13, 2022, 3:00 PM
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Henry-Nicolas Tourneur (hntourne)
Nick Black (dank)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Jan Mojžíš
Philip Wyett
Thomas Ward
Fabio Fantoni
Mohammed Bilal
Guilherme de Paula Xavier Segundo
Congratulations!...
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Arturo Borrero González: Toolforge GridEngine Debian 10 Buster migration
https://ral-arturo.org/2022/05/13/wmcs-toolforge-grid-debian-10.html
May 13, 2022, 9:42 AM
This post was originally published in the Wikimedia Tech blog, authored by Arturo Borrero Gonzalez.
In accordance with our operating system upgrade policy, we should migrate our servers to Debian Buster.
As discussed in the previous post, one of the most important and successful services provided by the Wikimedia Cloud Services team at
the Wikimedia Foundation is Toolforge. Toolforge is a platform that allows users and developers to run and use a variety of applications
with the ultimate goal ...
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Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 212 released
https://diffoscope.org/news/diffoscope-212-released/
May 13, 2022, 12:00 AM
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope
version 212. This version includes the following changes:
* Add support for extracting vmlinuz/vmlinux Linux kernel images.
(Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#304)
* Some Python .pyc files report as "data", so support ".pyc" as a
fallback extension.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage....
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Jonathan Dowland: Scalable Computing seminar
https://jmtd.net/log/scalable_seminar_2022/
May 12, 2022, 10:19 AM
Last week
I delivered a seminar for the research group I belong to,
Scalable Computing. This was a slightly-expanded version of the
presentation I gave at uksystems21. The most substantial change
is the addition of a fourth example to describe recent work on
optimising for a second non-functional requirement: Bandwidth.
scalable seminar 2022.pdf (PDF, 474K)...
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Raphaël Hertzog: Debian 9 soon out of (free) security support
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2022/05/11/debian-9-soon-out-of-free-security-support/
May 11, 2022, 1:13 PM
Organizations that are still running Debian 9 servers should be aware that the security support of the Debian LTS team will end on June 30th 2022.
If upgrading to a newer Debian release is not an option for them, then they should consider subscribing to Freexian’s Extended LTS to get security support for the packages that they are using on their servers.
It’s worth pointing out that we made some important changes to Freexian’s Extended LTS offering :
we are now willing to supp...
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Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, April 2022
https://www.decadent.org.uk/ben/blog/debian-lts-work-april-2022.html
May 10, 2022, 9:41 PM
In April I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS
initiative and carried over 8 hours from March. I worked 11 hours,
and will carry over the remaining time to May.
I spent most of my time triaging security issues for Linux, working
out which of them were fixed upstream and which actually applied to
the versions provided in Debian 9 "stretch". I also rebased the
Linux 4.9 (linux) package on the latest stable update, but did not
make an upload this month....
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Daniel Kahn Gillmor: 2022 Digital Rights Job Fair
https://dkg.fifthhorseman.net/blog/2022-digital-rights-job-fair.html
May 10, 2022, 8:39 PM
I'm lucky enough to work at the intersection between information communications technology and civil rights/civil liberties.
I get to combine technical interests and social/political interests.
I've talked with many folks over the years who are interested in doing similar work.
Some come from a technical background, and some from an activist background (and some from both).
Are you one of them?
Are you someone who works as an activist or in a technical field who wants to look into different ways...
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Russell Coker: Elon and Free Speech
https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/05/10/elon-free-speech/
May 10, 2022, 11:53 AM
Elon Musk has made the news for spending billions to buy a share of Twitter for the alleged purpose of providing free speech. The problem with this claim is that having any company controlling a large portion of the world’s communication is inherently bad for free speech. The same applies for Facebook, but that’s not a hot news item at the moment.
If Elon wanted to provide free speech he would want to have decentralised messaging systems so that someone who breaks rules on one platform could...
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Melissa Wen: Multiple syncobjs support for V3D(V) (Part 2)
https://melissawen.github.io/blog/2022/05/10/multisync-p2
May 10, 2022, 9:00 AM
In the previous post, I described how we enable multiple syncobjs capabilities
in the V3D kernel driver. Now I will tell you what was changed on the
userspace side, where we reworked the V3DV sync mechanisms to use Vulkan
multiple wait and signal semaphores directly. This change represents greater
adherence to the Vulkan submission framework.
I was not used to Vulkan concepts and the V3DV driver. Fortunately, I counted
on the guidance of the Igalia’s Graphics team, mainly
Iago Toral (thanks...
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Melissa Wen: Multiple syncobjs support for V3D(V) (Part 1)
https://melissawen.github.io/blog/2022/05/10/multisync-p1
May 10, 2022, 8:00 AM
As you may already know, we at
Igalia have been working on
several improvements to the 3D rendering drivers of Broadcom Videocore GPU,
found in Raspberry Pi 4 devices. One of our recent works focused on improving
V3D(V) drivers adherence to Vulkan submission and synchronization framework. We
had to cross various layers from the Linux Graphics stack to add support for
multiple syncobjs to V3D(V), from the Linux/DRM kernel to the Vulkan driver. We
have delivered bug fixes, a generic gate to extend...
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Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in April 2022
https://utkarsh2102.com/posts/foss-in-april-22/
May 10, 2022, 5:41 AM
Here’s my (thirty-first) monthly but brief update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
Debian
This was my 40th month of actively contributing to Debian.
I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas ‘19! o/
There’s a bunch of things I did this month but mostly non-technical, now that DC22 is around the corner. Here are the things I did:
Debian Uploads
Helped Andrius w/ FTBFS for php-text-captcha, reported via #977403.
I fixed the samed in Ubuntu a couple of...
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Robert McQueen: Evolving a strategy for 2022 and beyond
https://ramcq.net/2022/05/09/evolving-a-strategy-for-2022-and-beyond/
May 9, 2022, 2:01 PM
As a board, we have been working on several initiatives to make the Foundation a better asset for the GNOME Project. We’re working on a number of threads in parallel, so I wanted to explain the “big picture” a bit more to try and connect together things like the new ED search and the bylaw changes.
We’re all here to see free and open source software succeed and thrive, so that people can be be truly empowered with agency over their technology, rather than being passive consumers. We w...
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Russ Allbery: remctl 3.18
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-05/003.html
May 9, 2022, 4:49 AM
remctl is a simple RPC mechanism using Kerberos GSS-API authentication (or
SSH authentication).
The primary change in this release, and the reason for the release, is to
add support for PCRE2, the latest version of the Perl-Compatible Regular
Expression library, since PCRE1 is now deprecated.
This release also improves some documentation, marks the allocation
functions in the C client library with deallocation functions for GCC 11,
and fixes some issues with the Python and Ruby bindings th...
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Russ Allbery: rra-c-util 10.2
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-05/002.html
May 9, 2022, 4:43 AM
rra-c-util is my collection of utility functions, mostly but not entirely
for C, that I use with my various software releases.
There are two major changes in this release. The first is Autoconf
support for PCRE2, the new version of the Perl-Compatible Regular
Expression library (PCRE1 is now deprecated), which was the motivation for
a new release. The second is a huge update to the Perl formatting rules
due to lots of work by Julien ÉLIE for INN.
This release also tags deallocation func...
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Russ Allbery: C TAP Harness 4.8
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2022-05/001.html
May 9, 2022, 4:26 AM
C TAP Harness is my C implementation of the Perl "Test Anything Protocol"
test suite framework. It includes test runner and libraries for both C
and shell.
This is mostly a cleanup release to resync with other utility libraries.
It does fix an installation problem by managing symlinks correctly, and
adds support for GCC 11's new deallocation warnings.
The latter is a rather interesting new GCC feature. There is a
Red Hat blog post about the implementation with more details, but the
short...
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Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in April 2022
http://blog.alteholz.eu/2022/05/my-debian-activities-in-april-2022/
May 8, 2022, 10:01 AM
FTP master
This month I accepted 186 and rejected 26 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 188.
Debian LTS
This was my ninety-fourth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.
This month my all in all workload has been 40h. During that time I did LTS and normal security uploads of:
[DLA 2973-1] minidlna security update for one CVE
[DLA 2974-1] fribidi security update for three CVEs
[DLA 2988-1] tinyxml security upda...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RProtoBuf 0.4.19 on CRAN: Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/05/06#rprotobuf_0.4.19
May 6, 2022, 11:33 PM
A new release 0.4.19 of RProtoBuf arrived on CRAN earlier today. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers (“ProtoBuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol.
This release contains a pull request contribution by Michael Chirico to add support for the TextFormat API, a minor maintenance fix ensuring (standard) string are referenced as std::...
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Antoine Beaupré: Wallabako 1.4.0 released
https://anarc.at/blog/2022-05-06-wallabako-1.4.0-released/
May 6, 2022, 4:26 PM
I don't particularly like it when people announce their personal
projects on their blog, but I'm making an exception for this one,
because it's a little special for me.
You see, I have just released Wallabako 1.4.0 (and a quick,
mostly irrelevant 1.4.1 hotfix) today. It's the first release of
that project in almost 3 years (the previous was 1.3.1, before
the pandemic).
The other reason I figured I would mention it is that I have almost
never talked about Wallabako on this blog at all, so many ...
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Holger Levsen: 20220506-i-had-an-abortion
http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20220506-i-had-an-abortion/
May 6, 2022, 1:42 PM
I had an abortion...
Well, it wasn't me, but when I was 18 my partner thankfully was able to take
a 'morning-after-pill' because we were seriously not ready to have
a baby. As one data point: We were both still in high school.
It's not possible to ban abortions. It's only possible to ban safe abortions.
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: RQuantLib 0.4.16 on CRAN: Small Updates
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2022/05/05#rquantlib_0.4.16
May 6, 2022, 12:50 AM
A new release 0.4.16 of RQuantLib arrived at CRAN earlier today, and has been uploaded to Debian as well.
QuantLib is a very comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance; RQuantLib connects it to the R environment and language.
The release of RQuantLib comes agaain about four months after the previous release, and brings a a few small updates for daycounters, all thanks to Kai Lin, plus a small parameter change to avoid an error in an example, and small updates to the Docker f...
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Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in April 2022
https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2022-04/
May 5, 2022, 7:18 PM
Welcome to the April 2022 report from the Reproducible Builds project! In these reports, we try to summarise the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please take a few moments to visit our Contribute page on our website.
News
Cory Doctorow published an interesting article this month about the possibility of Undetectable backdoors for machine learning models. Given that machine learning models can provide unpred...
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Bits from Debian: Google Platinum Sponsor of DebConf22
https://bits.debian.org/2022/05/debconf22-google-platinum.html
May 5, 2022, 8:00 AM
We are very pleased to announce that Google
has committed to support DebConf22 as a
Platinum sponsor. This is the third year in a row that Google is
sponsoring The Debian Conference with the higher tier!
Google is one of the largest technology companies in the
world, providing a wide range of Internet-related services and products
as online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Google has been supporting Debian by sponsoring DebConf since more than
ten years,...
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Steve Kemp: A plea for books ..
https://blog.steve.fi/a_plea_for_books___.html
May 3, 2022, 5:15 PM
Recently I've been getting much more interested in the "retro" computers of my youth, partly because I've been writing crazy code in Z80 assembly-language, and partly because I've been preparing to introduce our child to his first computer:
An actual 1982 ZX Spectrum, cassette deck and all.
No internet
No hi-rez graphics
Easily available BASIC
And as a nice bonus the keyboard is wipe-clean!
I've got a few books, books I've hoarded for 30+ years, but I'd love to collect some more. So here...
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Gunnar Wolf: Using a RPi as a display adapter
https://gwolf.org/2022/05/using-a-rpi-as-a-display-adapter.html
May 3, 2022, 4:16 PM
Almost ten months ago, I mentioned on this
blog
I bought an ARM laptop, which is now my main machine while away from
home — a Lenovo Yoga C630
13Q50. Yes,
yes, I am still not as much away from home as I used to before, as
this pandemic is still somewhat of a thing, but I do move more.
My main activity in the outside world with my laptop is teaching. I
teach twice a week, and… well, having a display for my slides and
for showing examples in the terminal and such is a must. However, as I
said...
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Thomas Koch: Missing memegen
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2022-05-01-missing-memegen.html
May 1, 2022, 6:17 PM
Posted on May 1, 2022


Tags: debian, free software, life

Back at $COMPANY we had an internal meme-site. I had some reputation in my team for creating good memes. When I watched Episode 3 of Season 2 from Yes Premier Minister yesterday, I really missed a place to post memes.
This is the full scene. Please watch it or even the full episode before scrolling down to the GIFs. I had a good laugh for some time.
With Debian, I could just download the episode from somewhere on the...
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Thomas Koch: lsp-java coming to debian
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2022-03-12-lsp-java-coming-to-debian.html
May 1, 2022, 6:17 PM
Posted on March 12, 2022


Tags: debian

The Language Server Protocol (LSP) standardizes communication between editors and so called language servers for different programming languages. This reduces the old problem that every editor had to implement many different plugins for all different programming languages. With LSP an editor just needs to talk LSP and can immediately provide typicall IDE features.
I already packaged the Emacs packages lsp-mode and lsp-haskell for Debia...
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Thomas Koch: Waiting for a STATE folder in the XDG basedir spec
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2014-02-18-state-folder-in-xdg-basedir.html
May 1, 2022, 6:17 PM
Posted on February 18, 2014


Tags: debian, free software

The XDG Basedirectory specification proposes default homedir folders for the categories DATA (~/.local/share), CONFIG (~/.config) and CACHE (~/.cache). One category however is missing: STATE. This category has been requested several times but nothing happened.
Examples for state data are:
history files of shells, repls, anything that uses libreadline
logfiles
state of application windows on exit
recently opened files...
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Thomas Koch: shared infrastructure coop
https://blog.koch.ro/posts/2014-02-05-shared-infrastructure-coop.html
May 1, 2022, 6:17 PM
Posted on February 5, 2014


Tags: debian, free software

I’m working in a very small web agency with 4 employees, one of them part time and our boss who doesn’t do programming. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, that our development infrastructure is not perfect. We have many ideas and dreams how we could improve it, but not the time. Now we have two obvious choices: Either we just do nothing or we buy services from specialized vendors like github, atlassian, travis-ci,...
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Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities April 2022
http://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2022/05/01/floss-activities/
May 1, 2022, 12:26 AM
Focus
This month I didn't have any particular focus.
I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Changes
gensim:
allow dep override
icns:
missing comma
libpst:
fix MinGW build
Debian usertags:
drop + usertag,
reassign transition usertag
Debian package uploads:
mpv-mpris
Debian wiki pages:
DebConf/22/newpage,
DebianInstaller/Preseed,
DebianKernel/UserspaceTools,
DeveloperNews
(1
2),
Hardware/Wanted,
Kosovo test123,
PipeWire,
PortsDocs/New,
VirtualBox
FOSSjobs wiki pages:
Resources
Issues
C...
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Junichi Uekawa: Already May.
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/diary/daily/2022-May-1.html.en#2022-May-1-08:57:58
April 30, 2022, 11:57 PM
Already May.
I've been writing some code in rust and a bit of javascript. But real life is too busy.
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Jonathan Dowland: hyperlinked PDF planner
https://jmtd.net/log/planner/
April 29, 2022, 9:29 PM
The Year page
A day page
I've been having reasonable success with time blocking, a technique
I learned from Cal Newport's writings,
in particular Deep Work. I'd been doing it on paper for a while, but
I wanted to try and move to a digital solution.
There's a cottage
industry of people
making (and selling) various types of diary and planner as PDF files for use on
tablets such as the Remarkable. Some of these use
PDF hyperlinks to greatly improve navigating around. This one from Clo...
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Should we stop teaching the normal distribution?
http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2022-04-29-19-59_should_we_stop_teaching_the_normal_distribution.html
April 29, 2022, 6:59 PM
I guess Betteridge's law of headlines
gives you the answer, but bear with me. :-)
Like most engineers, I am a layperson in statistics; I had some in high
school, then an intro course in university and then used it in a couple
of random courses (like speech recognition). (I also took a multivariate
statistics course on my own after I had graduated.) But pretty much every practical
tool I ever learned was, eventually, centered around the normal distribution;
we learned about Student's t-test
in v...
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Holger Levsen: 20220429-Debian-Reunion-Hamburg-2022
http://layer-acht.org/thinking/blog/20220429-Debian-Reunion-Hamburg-2022/
April 29, 2022, 12:34 PM
Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 from May 23 to 30
This is just a quick reminder for the Debian Reunion Hamburg 2022 happening in a bit more than 3 weeks.
So far 43 people have registered and thus there's still some on site accomodation available.
There's no real deadline for registration, however if you register after May 1st you might not
get a t-shirt in your prefered size.
Also: if you attend to give a presentation but haven't replied to the CfP, please do so.
The wiki page linked above has a...
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Russ Allbery: Review: Interesting Times
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-227629-8.html
April 29, 2022, 2:50 AM
Review: Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett

Series:
Discworld #17


Publisher:
Harper


Copyright:
1994


Printing:
February 2014


ISBN:
0-06-227629-8


Format:
Mass market


Pages:
399

Interesting Times is the seventeenth Discworld novel and certainly
not the place to start. At the least, you will probably want to read
The Colour of Magic and
The Light Fantastic before this book,
since it's a sequel to...
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Jonathan McDowell: Resizing consoles automatically
https://www.earth.li/~noodles/blog/2022/04/resizing-consoles-automatically.html
April 28, 2022, 7:03 PM
I have 2 very useful shell scripts related to resizing consoles. The first is imaginatively called resize and just configures the terminal to be the requested size, neatly resizing an xterm or gnome-terminal:
#!/bin/sh
# resize <rows> <columns>
/bin/echo -e '