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Archives for 2010

5 free software to support with Flattr

November 1, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

Flattr FOSS LogoIt’s already the fourth issue of Flattr FOSS: it means 20 different projects using Flattr that I presented you. Here are the 5 suggestions for November:

  1. Redshift is a small utility that adjusts the color temperature of your screen to make it less aggressive on your eyes, in particular during evening/nights. It uses the time of the day and the geographic location to know whether it’s night or day. I discovered it this summer and I liked it, although I’m not running it permanently.
  2. Noscript is a Firefox plugin to control what sites can execute javascript, flash and other plugins. All those are creating supplementary security risks and you browse safer if you allow only some sites to run them. This is the number one entry on Flattr in the opensource category, it recently took the place of dpkg.
  3. phyMyAdmin is a web interface to manage MySQL databases. If you have such a database on a web-hosting service, you have likely already seen it in action. It’s an award-winning software with a 12 year history, it’s not so common for PHP applications. 🙂
  4. Chromium maintenance in Debian. Chromium is a rapidly-evolving & complex software and Giuseppe Iuculano has been tirelessly working on packaging it. Almost alone within Debian. He deserves kudos for his work even though he reused work made by Fabien Tassin on the Ubuntu package.
  5. Dulwich is a pure-Python implementation of the Git file formats and protocols. It’s an important building block for interoperability between Bazaar and Git: bzr-git (a Bazaar plugin providing Git integration) is notably using it. Given the large usage of bzr in Ubuntu and the popularity of Git world-wide, it’s important to have such gateways.

This article is part of the Flattr FOSS project.

Update: mentioned the work of Fabien Tassin on the chromium package within Ubuntu.

Latest features of dpkg-dev: debian packaging tools

October 30, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

I’m attending the mini-Debconf Paris and I just gave a talk about the latest improvement of dpkg-dev—the package providing the basic tools used to build Debian packages. Latest is a bit stretched since it embraces the last 2-3 years of development.

My talk covered the following topics:

  • Support of symbols files by dpkg-shlibdeps, dpkg-gensymbols
  • Support of new source formats by dpkg-source
  • Supplementary options for dpkg-source
  • Cross distribution collaboration with dpkg-vendor
  • Custom compilation flags with dpkg-buildflags
  • Miscellaneous improvements to other tools

The slides are relatively verbose so that you can understand them even if you did not attend the talk. Click here to get the slides.

Related links

This section points to various articles that cover more extensively some of the features mentioned in my talk.

Concerning dpkg-source:

  • About new source formats
  • How to customize dpkg-source’s behaviour in your Debian source package
  • How to create Debian packages with alternative compression methods
  • How to use multiple upstream tarballs in Debian source packages?
  • Managing distribution-specific patches with a common source package

Concerning dpkg-maintscript-helper:

  • Correctly renaming a conffile in Debian package maintainer scripts
  • The right way to remove an obsolete conffile in a Debian package

Concerning dpkg-vendor:

  • How to generate different dependencies on Debian and Ubuntu with a common source package

Nice OpenOffice.org template for Debian presentations

October 29, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

OpenOffice.org Impress Template for Debian Presentations While preparing for the upcoming mini-debconf Paris, I noticed that we don’t have any good presentation template for OpenOffice.org Impress. I spent a few hours browsing Debian presentations put online by many speakers and was unable to find one that would suit me.

This situation was clearly unacceptable and I decided to spend a few hours to fix this. I selected a very nice wallpaper created by Alexis Younes, used The Gimp to add a translucent white box so that the text can still be read, and combined all this in a OpenOffice.org Impress template.

Click here to download the template. You can also get the Gimp XCF file for the background image.

By the way, the same wallpaper has been used by Sam Hocevar to create nice-looking Debian business cards.

PS: I contacted Alexis Younes by mail and he agreed to put the wallpapers under GPL-2+. It has been clarified on his webpage.

PPS: Given that the selected background image is inspired by Debian’s restricted use logo, this template should only be used by official Debian members.

What Debian & Ubuntu topics would you like to read about?

October 27, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

A woman enjoying this blogAfter having looked back at the first months of this blog, I also want to look forward and see how I can improve its content. If you’re a Debian/Ubuntu user and/or contributor, I want this blog to be a truly useful resource for you. What kind of articles would you like me to write?

I have lots of ideas but I can’t do everything. I’ll share some of them so that you can discuss them:

  • New in Debian testing: a regular column covering changes affecting testing users.
  • Short presentations of software available in Debian/Ubuntu (like debaday.debian.net used to do).
  • Articles covering wishlist bugs on developers-reference so that they can be easily reused to improve the documentation!
  • Interviews of Debian contributors.
  • Description of small tasks that one can do to start contributing.

Pleases discuss and share your ideas in the comments. Don’t limit yourself to the above list, you know better than me what you need: tell me what kind of documentation was lacking in your daily usage of Debian/Ubuntu, or what could have been better explained while you tried to contribute to Debian/Ubuntu.

While I set no limits on Debian/Ubuntu topics that I accept to cover, my main focus is around documentation for end-users and/or contributors.

If you prefer you can also send your feedback with Identi.ca, Twitter or leave a comment in the entry for this article in my facebook page.

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