Free Software

Debian is my favourite distribution of GNU/Linux. It's a well respected and well known brand, although I was almost stunned while on business in London last Friday to meet someone who knew about Suse, and Red Hat but wasn't even aware of the existence of Debian. I like Debian's astonishing infrastructure, and its community led approach. It has been on the verge of releasing its next stable version, Lenny, for some time. I've been waiting for that freeze to end to have my debian packages of OPUS uploaded, since there is currently no real rush and I wanted to do more "upstream" work on them. At that point I wanted to start the long path to DD status (via maintainer).

Noodles, who is a DD, has recently commented on his frustration that Debian procrastinates at the end of every release cycle. This seems to be true, and internecine war always seems to erupt over issues that should have been solved long before (or alternatively after) the release. I'm also sympathetic to his suggestion that Debian's voting procedures could be improved.

Reading through Planet Debian today, I am more depressed than ever. Debian's secretary has resigned over voting issues and the vitriol unleashed by them. I'm not making any comment on that. There is already a constitutional pathway for an interim secretary, but now, the project can begin to rip new wounds in itself over the resignation, rumours of expulsion procedures and what to do next. What to do next is damn important, but so is the release.

I was in Plymouth in September with Lenny installer beta 2 CDs with Lenny images that wouldn't even install on the new hardware in a problem frustrating similar to one I found months before (Ubuntu, derived from Debian, embarrassingly did so without problems). I dare say that issue has been fixed (I can no longer test it), but it's a horrible reminder of how a prolonged freeze can lead to an OS that can be born obsolete in the sense that it can't install on newer hardware.

I use Icedove for mail mainly (the Debian variant of Thunderbird - a long and not very interesting story). I generally like it. I've used pine and mutt, but generally get too much stuff to view to make a text mode editor much fun. I've used evolution, but it was for a long time very slow, so now I tend to use Icedove. It locks up rather frequently on imladris (my main machine) running Debian unstable, and while I've now downloaded some debugging symbols I haven't devoted the time to finding out why yet.

Anyway, there are three things about it that really, really peeve me:

• Why don't the damn tags in version 2+ actually stick (in my imap folders, in dovecot) so that I reliably see them using the same flaming program in work?
• The feature to show a newly received mail is great, but it would be one thousand times more useful if I could tell the program to only feature mail in certain folders and/or not others. I don't really need to be told about how many thousands of new messages I have in my spam filtering folders all the time.
• Why does the exact same program view emails on my laptop in such a way that I frequently see all the "Your editor does not support graphical content" stuff on such emails?

Yes, I've tried google, yes, I've tried FAQs. Can't find the answers. I'm sure I've looked right past them. Anybody?

BTW... Two posts in one day? Not an excess of free time, trying desperately to take my mind of one of my cats who is very ill atm.

I recently reinstalled one of the boxes here, Lorien, from scratch. It was a brand new SATA disk and I used the Debian Lenny beta 2 installer. I'd never tried LVM before, I'd always used "normal" partitioning, but for some reason I figured I'd give this a shot. It all worked ok, but it left one problem. The amount of space Debian allocated to the root partition was pitifully small (less than 300 megabytes), and I hit a snag when a kernel upgrade came through, and wanted to install lots of stuff in that partition. So, first of all a warning, the guided partitioning is, and always has been in my opinion, not too optimal in the way it picks spaces for partitions. Secondly, here is how I fixed it, which is a slight pain since you can't have the root partition mounted.

Since I was going to have to resize my root partition, I used my Debian install CD again, but this time in rescue mode (just type rescue at the prompt). Then you can get a terminal up. I had inadvertently mounted my root partition as /target, so I began by unmounting it.


Next we need to reduce a partition. I chose to resize my home partition, original 200G to 199G, since I reckoned an extra gigabyte would be more than enough on the root partition.


Finally, increase the size of the root partition.

Ok, so I should have checked an odd message I saw when I installed the 32 bit debs, but now I know that tux droid is not entirely free.

As some of you will know I've had some spectacular bad luck with failing hardware both at home and at work recently. A few weeks ago I started to see the worrying signs of impending catastrophic disk failure on imladris. I bought a new SATA disk, and figured I might as well install an amd64 system (I was previous running an amd64 kernel with a completely 32 bit userland). The process went nice and smoothly (the Debian installer is so much better than it was 3 - 4 years ago). I'm still installing bits and pieces that have been forgotten, and I still have some other problems (can't listen to iplayer radio for example).

Today I resolved to reinstall the manager for tux, and found that the .deb files were available only for i386. Not daunted, I happily downloaded the tarballs to compile, but got lots of errors clearly stemming from a 32 bit / 64 bit mismatch. I found a forum article discussing a library that was packaged in i386 (why?) and downloaded the source and recompiled it for 64 bit. The same message persists, and then I found an unhappier thread. It looks like the whole project is using a closed source text to speech (TTS) system.

They are apparently producing a 64 bit version, but it kind of defeats the point... a poster boy product for an open source operating system, and parts of it are closed. Even if it can be compiled for i386 and amd64, what about the rest?

I've had some time to reflect on the OpenIsland conference held in Belfast last Friday, which I was involved in organising and spoke at. We had 170 people registered, and despite dire warning of bad snow storms (5 cm of snow causes Northern Ireland to grind to a halt), which I fear put off many participants, we still managed 110 people showing up at the start.

Sir Reg Empey, local minister turned up to launch Open NI the body which should partner Open Ireland in the Republic. We also had senior guests from the University of Ulster and the newly formed Southern Regional College. This was before our two keynote speakers, Bruce Perens, and Robert O'Dea.

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