News – Page 55

What about creating The Ubuntu Administrator’s Handbook?

October 18, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

I am currently running a crowdfunding campaign whose ultimate goal is to liberate the English translation of a French book that I have written. This book will be named The Debian Administrator’s Handbook because it has primarily been written for Debian.

Creating a new Ubuntu book based on The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

But since Ubuntu is based on Debian, a large part of its content applies equally well to Ubuntu. While discussing with Mark Shuttleworth, he suggested me to reuse those parts and to create a new book dedicated to Ubuntu. It would also cover the latest cloud technologies that Ubuntu has been delivering (since this is a topic that the current book does not cover).

This is something that I have been envisioning for a while and something that I would be ready to try if we manage to complete the liberation of the current book. This project would then bring a truly free book to the Ubuntu ecosystem.

Why? The official Ubuntu books are not really free

There’s a policy in place that ensures that official Ubuntu books use a free software/culture license and they are effectively available under the terms of a Creative Commons Share Alike license. But try to create a derivative book… you won’t find the “sources” (LaTeX or DocBook usually with most big books). You can only find a few PDF copies if you google for it. But this is really not the preferred form of modification for such a book.

Those books are also not packaged. Ubuntu much like Debian deserves to have a good book embodying the values of free software that can be shipped together with its product.

When I speak of liberation of the book, I really mean it in the way that free software hackers are used to: a public Git repository containing the DocBook sources, the pictures and the .dia files for the various schemas.

Help Ubuntu by spreading the word

I understand that at this point this proposed Ubuntu book is really hypothetical (“vaporware” one could say) but we need to go step by step to make it a reality. And the first step is to ensure that we manage to liberate the Debian Administrator’s Handbook.

For this I am seeking the support of the Ubuntu community to promote the current fundraising campaign. If the perspective of the Ubuntu book is not enough to convince you, you’ll be glad to learn that I also commit to give back to Ubuntu 15% of the money raised via the link below (once VAT has been subtracted).

Click here to go to the crowdfunding campaign page and pledge a few euros. Then share this article (or the link https://debian-handbook.info/go/ulule-ubuntu/) and convince others to participate.

At this point, the liberation target is entirely reachable with your help and the help of the community: the remaining 18 K€ needed in the liberation fund represent 720 persons giving 25 EUR each or 1800 persons giving 10 EUR each.

Thank you very much for your support and your help in this project!

GNOME 3 transition happening in Debian unstable

October 17, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

The few articles I wrote that explained how to install GNOME 3 from Debian experimental have been very popular. So I figured out that a small update would be welcome.

The Debian GNOME team started uploading a mix of GNOME 3.0 and 3.2 packages to Debian unstable because the release team is ready to take care of this transition. This means that as soon as the packages are ready in Debian unstable, the release team will ensure that they also reach wheezy (aka the current testing distribution).

So if you’re a Debian unstable/testing user with a GNOME Desktop, expect some important changes… by the way my experience with GNOME 3 was recently plagued by some rendering issues resulting in parts of the screen not being properly refreshed. While trying to track this down (and investigating clutter as a possible culprit) I came upon this mail on the clutter-devel mailing list. I recompiled mutter with the indicated patch and it fixed my issue. I immediately uploaded mutter 3.0.2.1-4 with the fix… so this issue should be gone for the many people who are going to experience GNOME 3 for the first time in the coming days.

It’s also worth noting that contrary to how upstream handles it (they hide the fallback mode and the user has to enable an option to use it in place of the GNOME Shell), Debian has a dedicated session for the GNOME 3 fallback mode so you decide what you get right from the login screen. This will be appreciated by the people who do not see GNOME 3 as a step in the right direction. Unless they switch to XFCE as some did.

As far I am concerned, I’m already used to GNOME 3. I spend most of my time in terminals, browsers and an IRC application and the whole Shell does not fundamentally changes my work habits.

My Debian activities in September 2011

October 7, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (144.3 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Dpkg work

While taking care of the last details for the hardening feature in dpkg 1.16.1, I have mailed debian-devel to find volunteers to handle a hardening release goal. The objective is to ensure a large number of packages have been converted/rebuilt to actually use the new hardening build flags.

Then I prepared the draft of the announce of the dpkg 1.16.1 upload (aka Bits of dpkg maintainers sent to debian-devel-announce) which got expanded by Guillem to also cover new features since dpkg 1.15.7.

update-alternatives got some refactoring by Guillem which resulted in a regression that has been fortunately discovered by Sven Joachim. I fixed that regression and did some further cleanup inspired by the root cause of this regression (see top 4 commits here).

Note that Sven is one of the few persons who are running the git version of dpkg. Hopefully the number of tester will increase since I recently documented the APT repositories with autobuilt versions of dpkg in the wiki.

At the end of the month, I started working on a bugfix release (what’s going to be 1.16.1.1) by fixing some of the unavoidable problems discovered after an upload that accumulated more than 4 months worth of work (see top 4 commits here).

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

I spent countless hours finalizing the launch of the crowdfunding campaign for the Debian Administrator’s Handbook and it went live on September 27th.

So far it’s on good track with more than 63% of the base funding already secured. But we still have a long way to go to reach the liberation goal (we’re at 21%). It’s still worth nothing that more than 55% of the money raised has been put in the liberation fund so there are many persons who care about getting the book freed.

More than 250 persons are supporting the project currently with an average contribution of 38 EUR. I would have expected much less for the average contribution but many more supporters. I still hope we can get more people on board with the perspective of a good DFSG-free Debian ebook.

Did you order your copy? If not, click here and fix this! 😉 By the way Paypal used to be required but it’s no longer the case, you can support the project just with your usual credit card.

Misc blog updates

Over time, I have written many useful articles for Debian users and Debian contributors. But scattered in the history, they are somewhat difficult to find. To fix this I have created some index pages listing them. Check them out:

Two new articles joined those pages this month: How to triage bugs in the Debian Bug Tracking System and Understand dpkg and don’t get stuck with a maintainer script failure.

While writing the first article, I noticed we lacked a good page showing the most buggy packages so I quickly created it (with the help of UDD): http://qa.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugs-by-source

Misc packaging work

I did a small update to the developer’s reference. Luca Falavigna submitted a patch to clarify how one is supposed to deal with meta-packages (cf #569219), I improved it and integrated the result in the SVN repository.

I upgraded nautilus-dropbox to version 0.6.9 and while doing this I discovered a bug in mergechanges (filed as #640782). I uploaded a new release of quilt mainly to add the Multi-Arch: foreign field so that it can satisfy dependencies of foreign packages (i.e. packages of a different architecture).

Django released some security advisories (tracked in #641405) and since the maintainer did not deal with the issue, I stepped up to the task (I’m a backup maintainer) and released the fixed version 1.3.1 to unstable. I took the opportunity to switch from python-support to dh_python2, and do some misc improvements to the packaging (see changelog).

I wanted to update publican to a newer version but it turned out to be not possible because Debian doesn’t have the latest version of docbook-xsl yet. I also discovered some bugs in the test suite and forwarded upstream the patch I created (see upstream bug). On top of this, fop was failing due to some java problem related to the introduction of multiarch. After having reported the bug, the java maintainers quickly released a fixed version.

So now publican is ready in the git repository but it’s waiting on the docbook-xsl update. I got in touch with the maintainer who said he would have the time to take care of it by mid-october.

Thanks

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

Contribute to Debian while promoting the Debian Administrator’s Handbook

September 27, 2011 by Raphaël Hertzog

We just announced the launch of the fundraising campaign for the Debian Administrator’s Handbook.

We wanted to use this opportunity to let people contribute money both to our project but also to Debian itself. That’s why we have setup a special link that you can use to participate. 15% of any donation made through this link (after VAT has been subtracted) will be given back to the Debian Project.

Here’s the link: https://debian-handbook.info/go/ulule-debian/

Feel free to use this link when promoting the project to your friends, so that even more money goes back to Debian.

You can also embed a special widget on your website where any visitor that ends up becoming a supporter will also contribute 15% to the Debian project.

Help us spread the word about the project, and help raise money for Debian!