debian on linux & the mountains

Building reverse build dependencies in salsa CI

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 15:33:00 +0000

For the next library soname bump of gpsd I needed to rebuild all reverse dependencies. As this is a task I have to do very often, I came up with some code to generate (and keep uptodate) an include for the gitlab CI. Right now it is rather uncommented, undocumented, but works well. If you like it, MRs are very welcome. https://salsa.debian.org/bzed/reverse-dependency-ci/ The generated files are here: https://bzed.pages.debian.net/reverse-dependency-ci/ Usage: include: - https://salsa.

Public service annoucement for a modern Debian

Sun, 08 Dec 2019 01:48:00 +0000

Don’t forget to vote! echo " - - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- 7b77e0f2-4ff9-4adb-85e4-af249191f27a [ 1 ] Choice 1: F: Focus on systemd [ 2 ] Choice 2: B: Systemd but we support exploring alternatives [ 5 ] Choice 3: A: Support for multiple init systems is Important [ 6 ] Choice 4: D: Support non-systemd systems, without blocking progress [ 4 ] Choice 5: H: Support portability, without blocking progress [ 7 ] Choice 6: E: Support for multiple init systems is Required [ 8 ] Choice 7: G: Support portability and multiple implementations [ 3 ] Choice 8: Further Discussion - - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- "

Collecting statistics from TP-Link HS110 SmartPlugs using collectd

Wed, 13 Dec 2017 18:15:00 +0000

Running a 3d printer alone at home is not necessarily the best idea - so I was looking for a way to force it off from remote. As OctoPrint user I stumbled upon a plugin to control TP-Link Smartplugs, so I decided to give them a try. What I found especially nice on the HS110 model was that it is possible to monitor power usage, current and voltage. Of course I wanted to have a long term graph of it. The result is a small collectd plugin, written in Python. It is available on github: https://github.com/bzed/collectd-tplink_hs110.

Connecting your 3D printer to OctoPrint automatically

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 14:35:00 +0000

Recently I joined the group of 3d printer owners and OctoPrint users. After some days I got annoyed by the fact that so far nobody seems to have thought about automatically connecting a printer to OctoPrint after turning the printer on. If you start OctoPrint after your printer, everything works fine. But here OctoPrint runs 24/7 but I turn off the printer when it is done with printing. My solution of the problem is based on udev and systemd and should work on most recent Linux installations.

bzed-letsencrypt puppet module

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 19:55:01 +0000

With the announcement of the Let’s Encrypt dns-01 challenge support we finally had a way to retrieve certificates for those hosts where http challenges won’t work. Also it allows to centralize the signing procedure to avoid the installation and maintenance of letsencrypt clients on all hosts. For an implementation I had the following requirements in my mind: Handling of key/csr generation and certificate signing by puppet. Private keys don’t leave the host they were generated on.

open-vm-tools updated

Mon, 04 Jan 2016 10:06:01 +0000

In January 2014 the open-vm-tools package was orphaned and I took the chance to take over the maintenance. Unfortunately the package is still not 100% in the shape I’d like to see it, but I’m getting closer. I have to say Thank You for a lot of good bug reports, especially for those use cases which are hard to test/reproduce for me (running Debian in a Windows-based VMware Workstation Player for example….

bzed.de online again

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 19:41:06 +0000

Finally, bzed.de is back online and I’m planning to start blogging again! Part of the reason why I became inactive was the usage of ikiwiki, which is great, but at end unnecessarily complicated. So I’ve migrated by page to gohugo.io - a static website generator, written in go. Hugo has an active community and it is easy to create themes for it or to enhance it. Also it is using plain Markdown syntax instead of special ikiwiki syntax mixed into it - should make it easy to migrate away again if necessary.

Report from the Bug Squashing Party in Salzburg

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Participation and Results From June 15-17th we held a Debian BugSquashingParty in Salzburg, hosted and sponsored by conova communications GmbH. It was a fun and busy weekend, with 15-17 people from 5 countries being around, mainly working on RC bugs in Testing/Unstable. Gerfried Fuchs (rhonda) also worked on triaging the impact of RC bugs on the version in Squeeze, while Peter Palfrader (weasel) took care of Tor related things and Debian sysadmin work, including starting on the new bugs and udd hosts.

Bug squashing party in Salzburg

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Just as a little reminder, the Bug Squashing Party in Salzburg will start in three days. We still have sponsored accomodation for five four people left, so don’t hesitate to come! Squashing as many RC bugs for Wheezy as possible is on the TODO list for the weekend! Also we’ll work on making Debian a proper Spacewalk client. This might be a bit too late for Wheezy, but there will be backports :)

Working on spacewalk support for and in Debian

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 21:38:00 +0000

With the latest release of Spacewalk PostgreSQL seems to be supported properly finally. Also there are efforts to support Debian as a client system. So I’m thinking about using the upcoming BugSquashingParty in Salzburg to analyze the current support of Debian as a client in Spacewalk and maybe work on a better integration finalize the packaging and upload the client packages which were prepared by Miroslav Suchý (I hope he will be able to join us!

Nagios-plugins-contrib released

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:47:19 +0000

Nagios or Icinga users probably know the problem that neither the default plugin packages (nagios-plugins-basic and -standard) nor the few other plugin packages ship all the plugins you need to monitor your hardware and software properly. And unless you have puppet, cfengine or some other automation software, you probably just start searching plugins on Nagios Exchange, MonitoringExchange or some other machines you are monitoring already. Your problem shall be solved! nagios-plugins-contrib passed NEW today.

Re-indenting files with vim

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 17:28:45 +0200

Sometimes projects with a long history of committers tend to collect various styles of indentation. Unfortunately not for all programming languages exist specialized tools like indent for C/C++, so we need to find a different way to mass-indent files properly. Using vim is one of them. First you need to create a file (let’s call it /tmp/indent.vim) including all the vim commands you want to run on your code. The following piece is a good start:

Plusone button plugin for ikiwiki

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 16:29:32 +0200

Just published an ikiwiki plugin to add google’s +1 buttons. See ikiwiki.info/plugins/contrib/plusone/ for details. And if you enable html5 in your ikiwiki settings, it won’t show up on planet debian as ugly g:plusone tag.

Merkaartor development version in experimental

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 15:28:22 +0000

For people who do not follow the Merkaartor mailing list: Regulary updated development snapshots are available in experimental again. Please report bugs, either in the Debian BTS or in the upstream bugtracker. Latest addition to Merkaartor is a plugin to support the French Cadastre peoject.

Monitoring scientific atlanta cable modems with munin

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 22:57:23 +0200

Usually I like to monitor as much as possible. but unfortunately my cable provider does not allow to access the cable modem via SNMP, so I had to find a different way to retrieve at least some basic information. After a bit of googling I figured out how to access the web interface of the Scientific Atlanta modems. The model here is a EPC2203 - seems to work for various models, though.

Refactoring the guruplug server plus - part two

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 11:58:10 +0000

Although the modifications described in my last blog post about refactoring the GuruPlug resulted in a well working GuruPlug, I’ve decided to give it some more air to breath at the top of the case. The large round piece of plastic in the middle asked to be removed - and now a shiny 60mm fan grill protects the board from the bad world outside of the case. So far its working fine and not too hot.

Refactoring the guruplug server plus

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 22:24:12 +0000

As mentioned in my last blog post the GuruPlug Server Plus needs some major refactoring before it can be used. Not doing so will make you end up with a fried brick. There are various stories in the forums about cooling it properly, so you might want to have a look first instead of following mine blindly. And of course - whatever you do - it is your fault when you end up with a brick, not mine!

The guruplug server plus - major design and qa fail

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:25:24 +0000

As a lot of people are coming to my blog to read the installing instructions for Debian on the GuruPlug Server Plus, I shall not hide my opinion about it: It is a major design and QA fail. Don’t waste your money on it. The power supply Although I’ve ordered the Guruplug pretty early with the promise, that I’d have it in April, it arrived at the end of May due to QA issues with the power supply.

Gimp-plugin-registry 3.5-1

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 22:41:34 +0200

During the last three months and since my last blog-post about gimp-plugin-registry a lot happened: Mainly a large number of new plugins was added, but also various enhancements and bugfixes went into the package, together with updates for various already included plugins. For those who don’t know gimp-plugin-registry yet, it is a collection of scripts and plugins for The GIMP. The name is based on the webpage GIMP Plugin Registry, where most (new) plugins and scripts are listed.

Creating a google sitemap for ikiwiki

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:23:49 +0200

ikiwiki is not yet able to create a Google sitemap internally, so I’m using google-sitemapgen. To run it automatically when the website is being updated, I’ve changed the git hook to run it after the ikiwiki hook. In the ikiwiki setup file let git_wrapper point to a file which is not the post-update hook, so you’re able to run it from your own skript. I’m using /path/to/myikiwiki.git/hooks/post-update.ikiwiki. Write a skript which runs as post-update hook and executes the created hook from ikiwiki and google-sitemapgen with a proper configuration.

Signs of bad package maintenance

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 02:13:52 +0200

<rant>Recently I’ve adopted a package, mainly as Merkaartor uses it now. It made me sad to see in which bad condition the package was. Here are just a few things I had to do to bring it into shape: The former maintainer removed the documentation and added a +dfsg to the version as there were a few hints left that it is under GFDL or under no license at all.

Styling changes in ikiwiki 3.20100610

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 01:53:00 +0200

Some minutes before the release of 3.20100610 we convinced Joey in #ikiwiki to commit the following changes: The part of the page which is usually parallel to the sidebar lives within a new div with the id “pagebody” now. This is the proper fix for the issue and workaround described here. pre elements will show a scrollbar automatically now, thanks to overflow: auto; in the CSS. We hope that nobody wants to hit us with a bat now :-)

Merkaartor 0.16.0 available in unstable

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 01:10:13 +0200

Merkaartor 0.16.0 was uploaded to Debian/unstable several days ago and should be available on all architectures now. As usual please help testing the new version - upstream and me will try to fix all bugs as fast as possible. Below follows the long list of new features, for the full list of changes see the CHANGELOG. Ramer-Douglas-Peucker simplification of ways (in Roads menu) support for JOSM remote protocol on port 8111 support for “standard” (as in http://wiki.

Installing Debian on the guruplug server plus

Sat, 29 May 2010 15:36:42 +0000

– Before buying or using a GuruPlug make sure you first read “the guruplug server plus - major design and qa fail” and “refactoring the guruplug server plus” – Yesterday finally my GuruPlug Server Plus arrived. Took longer than expected, but as it seems Globalscale had some issues with the power supplies and they were replaced before shipping the GuruPlugs. The GuruPlug Basically the GuruPlugs are an enhanced version of the well known SheevaPlugs, the biggest difference is probably the need for an external JTAG/UART<>RS232 board to access the serial console.

Merkaartor - countdown to 0.16

Thu, 20 May 2010 22:44:09 +0200

As announced on the Merkaartor mailing lists, version 0.16 is planned to be released on 6th June. Therefore I’ve uploaded a git snapshot to experimental today. Please give it a try and report all problems, either to the Debian BTS or directly in the upstream bug tracker. Version 0.16 will contain a lot of new features and various bugfixes and enhancements. For me the most important additions are support for Walking Papers and support for OpenStreetBugs.

Deb.li - the Debian ShortURL Service - status update

Wed, 19 May 2010 01:11:30 +0200

Although my progress in adding new features is not too fast (hint: patches and help is welcome), I’m quite happy with the progress of deb.li. As mentioned on my last post on debian-devel@l.d.o, I’ve spent some time to migrate it to the new, but very well written microframework Flask, which is based on Werkzeug, the probably most advanced WSGI utility module. The migration also allowed me to clean up several pieces of messy code which were necessary to work around some issues in python-bottle.

New css for bzed.de

Wed, 19 May 2010 01:11:30 +0200

After more than a year of using ikiwiki to run bzed.de I thought it would be a good time replace the darkish-brown style by something bright. Also I wanted to get righ of the massive changes I had to do on the template files to make the old layout work. Unfortunately I hit one of the - in my opinion - major problems in the ikiwiki templates again: You can’t rely on all <div>s being available on all pages, which is quite annoying when you need them to style the page with CSS.

Gimp-plugin-registry package updated

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 21:05:47 +0200

Yesterday I finally found the time to update gimp-plugin-registry, the (hopefully!) largest and best collection of plugins for The GIMP. As usual here comes a short summary of the changes: The wonderful scripts from El Samuko are included now: Antique Photo Border Script Che Guevara Script Cyanotype Script Difference Layer Script Escape Line Script Film Grain Script First Photo Border Script Lomo Script with Old Style Colors Movie 300 Script National Geographic Script Obama “HOPE” Script Rainy Landscape Script Photochrom Script Sprocket Hole Script Sunny Landscape Script Technicolor 2 Color Script Technicolor 3 Color Script Vintage Look Script Included the X11 Mouce Curser (XMC) plugin as requested by KiBi.

Deb.li - the Debian ShortURL Service - beta test

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:46:45 +0200

After several other Debian developers convinced me that a ShortURL service, which is under control of a Debian Developer would be useful for them, I’ve spent some time to write the necessary code for it. And if it will be used regulary, I’ll ask DSA if they want to host it on a proper machine. So I’m happy to announce the public beta test of deb.li (also available under go.debian.net)! Please note that neither the content of the pages nor the CSS is finished… :)

Assimilated

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:09:08 +0100

[[!img /_images/fedora_assimilated.jpg alt=“At the Chemnitzer Linux Tage the fedora project was assimilated by the Debian project as fedora realized that rpm is crap ;)” ]]

Merkaartor svn snapshot uploaded to experimental

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:01:28 +0100

As the release of version 0.15 of Merkaartor (a map editor for OpenStreetMap.org) is planned for the end of February, I’ve uploaded a svn snapshot based on revision 19956 to Debian experimental. Please test it and report bugs to the BTS as soon as possible, so I can triage and forward them to upstream.

Caching issues in django

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:41:13 +0100

Yesterday I stumbled upon an interesting and broken behaviour of Django: Running two instances with the same memcached as cache backend might result in displaying the wrong template from the cache in case we have template files with the same name but a different content. This behaviour is also visible in all django applications which use the cache backend without taking care of settings.CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_KEY_PREFIX. As mentioned in the bug report a design decision is necessary here, as the setting was only supposed to be used in middlewares.

The ganneff way of becoming a Debian package maintainer

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:46:43 +0100

Once there was a project called Debian and a Ganneff…. (unfortunately in German only….) 22:20 Das ist doch voll die Arbeit Maintainer zu werden :-). Ich geb gewünschte Pakete immer nur weiter an einen der da sowieso schon den Kernel betreut :-) 22:21 es is nur viel arbeit wenn du keinen schimmer hast 22:22 ja ich hab nur das seepferdchen *g* 22:22 Knusper: ja sicher ist es das 22:22 kopf - tisch 22:22 Knusper, wenn du die verwaisten pakete findest siehst du auf der gleichen seite auch die links wie man maintainer wird 22:22 die hab ich gefunden 22:22 zumindest hab ich das das letzte mal dort gesehen 22:24 wnpp?

Douf00 - fat free presentations

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:39:21 +0200

Now there is yet another package with a weird name in Debian - douf00 - a lightweight, slim and straight forward presentation tool. Written by some guys from a hacking and security team, which is mainly based in Vienna - guess that explains the l33t name (if you’re scared now, yes, I’ve reviewed the code…). At the FrOSCon one of the authors asked me if I’d be willing to package it for Debian.

Retrieving debconf translations from the bts

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:17:16 +0200

Downloading debconf translations from the bts and committing them to my packaging repository was always a task which pretty much annoyed me. Today I spent some time on writing a script which does this job for me. There is still much to improve - it is more like a prove of concept - but it works for me. With some love and probably a rewrite in Perl or Python it is a good candidate for devscripts probably.

Pidgin-blinklight replacement for other messengers

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:39:22 +0200

One of my favourite plugins for pidgin is pidgin-blinklight, which blinks my ThinkPad’s ThinkLight upon the arrival of new messages. Pretty useful as it is not as annoying (especially for others around you) as playing weird sounds. Unfortunately such a plugin is not available for other messengers like psi - but you’re able to specify your own sound player. So I came up with the following script, which is my default sound player in psi now.

Gpsd 2.39-3 in Debian experimental

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:56:07 +0200

Since a few days a new revision of gpsd is available in Debian/experimental. If you’re a gpsd user, please give it a try as it contains various changes to the debconf templates and the config script. Although I don’t expect any problems, it is better to test it well. Also there’re several updates of the template translations missing and I want to give the translators some more time before uploading the package to unstable.

Looking for a grip replacement

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:50:10 +0200

Today was the first day I needed a tool to rip an audio CD after the removal of grip from testing/unstable. Unfortunately I did not find an appropriate replacement yet. At the moment I’m using asunder, which is nice, but missing a lot of the features grip had. Dear lazyweb, is there a proper replacement for grip out there, or is anybody willing to take over the upstream maintenance for grip?

Vmbuilder for Debian

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:25:09 +0200

As we needed it for one of our customers, I’ve started to add support for Debian to the Ubuntu VMBuilder. My changes are not merged into trunk yet, but you can get them by running bzr branch lp:~bzed/vmbuilder/debian. At the moment there is only support for Etch, I’ll add Lenny and Squeeze as soon as I find the time for it, probably next week - patches are welcome.

Howto set android developer device permissions with udev

Sun, 24 May 2009 22:33:47 +0200

As there’re several, more or less well working howtos about creating udev rules to allow access to the USB debug devices of Android phones out there in the wild, I decided to write my own one. The udev rules file I provide here works at least for the HTC Dream models (aka T-Mobile G1 and Google Devphone) and the ZTE Blade (aka Orange San Francisco), probably for other phones, too.

Package build time: cdbs vs dh

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:43:04 +0200

Most people (at least those who hear me shouting on irc) probably know that I’m not a fan of cdbs. While working on geoclue, which builds a lot of binary packages I realized, that cdbs wastes an insane amount of time by calling dh_* for every single package. One of the reasons geoclue uses cdbs is that the maintainer likes the short debian/rules file. We’ll, compare yourself: cdbs: #!/usr/bin/make -f # -*- makefile -*- # Uncomment this to turn on verbose mode.

Gimp-plugin-registry updated

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:57:40 +0200

Somehow I managed to forget to blog about this for some time - version 2.1-1 of gimp-plugin-registry is available in testing since several days. For detailed changes please have a look in the changelog, for the impatient - here is the summary: New plugins: btn4ws, sprocket-hole, cmyk-tiff-2-pdf, dustcleaner (back again, was removed for stable as it was not mature enough) New upstream versions of the following plugins: lqr, DBP, diana-holga2, focusblur, GREYCstoration, LayerEffects (now using Python), normalmap, save-for-web, seperate+, wavelet-denoise Removed plugins: exposure-blend As usual let me know if there’s a nice plugin you’d like to see in the package.

Gimp-plugin-registry update planned

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:30:24 +0100

Within the next days I plan to update the gimp-plugin-registry package, including the latest versions of all plugins. So if you’d like to see a new fance plugin in the package, or you have any other wish, please add a comment here, or even better, file a wishlist bug report against the package. Patches are welcome, git repository informations are listed below. gitweb git://git.recluse.de/debian/pkg-gimp-plugin-registry.git http://git.recluse.de/repos/debian/pkg-gimp-plugin-registry.git Extra points if you find new/forked versions of plugins which are/were listed on registry.

Why you should use gpsd over gypsy

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 01:48:05 +0100

While working on the Debian packages of navit I stumbled upon gypsy, as the libgypsy is used by navit to listen to notifications about location changes via D-Bus. As maintainer of the gpsd package I started to wonder what the opinion of the gpsd developers about gypsy is - especially after reading that “Gypsy was designed to fix the numerous design flaws found in GPSD”. Well, here is their answer, which I support fully.

Awesome calendar widget

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 01:18:25 +0100

One of the things I was missing in my favourite windowmanager awesome was a calendar widget. So I spent some minutes and coded it. Moving the mouse over the time widget will show a naughty popup with the current month, use your mouse buttons (and the shift key) to scroll trough the months. The only annoying thing was to figure out how to change the text of an existing notification: notification.

Migrating to ikiwiki

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 03:31:57 +0100

Hi Planet Debian! After being away from the planet for more than a year now, I’m finally back :) My plan to migrate to ikiwiki got postponed a lot of times as I had more important things to do. The migration of the content of my old wiki is still not complete, but I hope to finish that soon. Why I’ve migrated away from Dokuwiki? Mainly because I really prefer to have a git backend and being able to add content with vim.