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You are here: Home / News / Debian News / My Free Software Activities in March 2013

My Free Software Activities in March 2013

April 7, 2013 by Raphaël Hertzog

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (114.19 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Simple-CDD and debian-cd

I tried to use wheezy’s version of debian-cd and simple-cdd to generate an automatic installer. In this process, I filed a couple of bugs on simple-cdd (#701963: type-handling package is gone and should not be listed in default.downloads, and #701998: the --keyboard parameter is not working with wheezy’s debian-installer) and I commited fixes for a few issues in debian-cd:

  • r2518: adjust Makefile for new xorriso requirement
  • r2520: add missing depends on dosfstools
  • r2521: use --no-check-gpg when querying debootstrap
  • r2522: make debian-cd work with a mirror without sources)

Debian France

I completed the new website for Debian France and I put it online. Later I merged some supplementary enhancements prepared by Tanguy Ortolo (and I gave him commits rights at the same time).

I tried to update our Galette installation to the latest upstream version but I reverted to the former version after having encountered two problems (filed here and here). In the process, I created a Debian package for galette (you can grab it on git.debian.org).

I also suggested an idea of improvement for Galette’s paypal plugin and it has been quickly implemented. Thus I updated the plugin installed on france.debian.net.

Kali related work

It’s been a few months that I have been helping the Kali team to prepare this new Debian derivative. Now that the derivative has gone public, I can attribute some of my Debian work to my collaboration with the Kali team.

This month I contributed a few features and fixes to debian-installer and live-build:

  • #702257: new preseed entry to disable CDROM entries
  • #703072: hid-generic module is missing from input-modules udeb (affecting experimental kernel only)
  • Fix win32-loader support in live-build

After the launch, we registered Kali in the derivative census. Paul Wise quickly reported some misfiled bugs from early Kali users and I discovered that reportbug was not behaving properly even though we correctly updated base-files (see #703678 on reportbug and #703677 on lsb-release).

Misc packaging work

  • I sponsored a new upstream version of dnsjava because it’s required by Jitsi.
  • I prepared rebuild 0.4.1.1 and uploaded it to testing-proposed-updates for a RC bug fix.
  • I uploaded Publican 3.1.5 to experimental and filed #703514 to request a new upstream version of docbook-xsl that is needed by Publican.
  • I filed #703995 to fix apt-setup’s handling of the apt-setup/multiarch preseed option.

DPL election

I also spent quite some time to read and participate to the discussions on debian-vote since it was campaigning time for the DPL candidates…

Thanks

This was a rather active month if you take into account the fact that I got a second son — Lucas — on March 6th.

See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

Filed Under: Debian News, News Tagged With: Activity summary, d-i, Debian, Debian France, debian-cd, Kali Linux, Me, simple-cdd

Comments

  1. Gbolahan Omotola says

    April 8, 2013 at 8:15 pm

    congratulations on the birth of your boy, may he grow up to become to give us a new distro based on Debian. I have always been curious about the distro that serves as the base of Ubuntu, but have been hindered due to the scarcity of good book on Debian.
    I stumbled upon this site, early this year, and got access to the Debian Administrators Handbook.
    I’m heading towards Debian Land thanks to you
    Cheers

    • Raphaël Hertzog says

      April 8, 2013 at 9:46 pm

      Thanks for the kind words! I don’t know whether my latest son will follow his father but my first son (3 years old) already clearly recognizes the Debian logo 😉

  2. Jon says

    April 9, 2013 at 3:26 am

    Congratulations on your new son!

  3. Juan Ignacio says

    April 12, 2013 at 2:33 pm

    Felicidades por tu nuevo hijo! =) // Congratulations!! Thank you for making my new experiences in debian (and linux in general) very enjoyable!!

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