sunweaver's blog
TL;DR; This is a call to every FLOSS developer interested in working towards Free Software driven mobile phones, esp. targetting the Fairphone 2. If your only show stopper is lack of development hardware or lack of financial support, please go on reading below.
As I see it, the Fairphone 2 will be (or already is) the FLOSS community platform on the mobile devices market. Regularly, I get new notice about people working on this or that OS port to the FP2 hardware platform. The combination of a hardware-wise sustainably maintained mobile phone platform and a Free (or sort-of-Free) operating system being ported to it, makes the Fairphone 2 a really attractive device.
Personally, I run Sailfish OS on my Fairphone 2. Some weeks ago, I got contacted by one of my sponsors letting me know that he got involved in setting up an initiative that works on porting the Ubuntu Table/Phone OS to FP2. That very project is in need of more developers.
TL;DR;
If you run a FLOSS development project and you notice D0n1elT appearing on your IRC channel, please give him a warm welcome. D0n1elT is a young man highly talented in various FLOSS related topics already. He probably needs some guidance at the beginning and I hope he won't be too shy to ask for it. But you can be sure: your channel has been joined by someone you should consider as a future resource.
The Long Story
During the last two weeks I had the great pleasure of supervising a fine young man (very young, still, indeed) in all sorts of IT topics. This young man turned out to be so skilled and interested in various FLOSS related areas, I really want to introduce him to all of you.
The young man's real name is Daniel Teichmann. On IRC he may appear under his nick: D0n1elT. His GnuPG Fingerprint is: 6C6E 7F8F F7E8 B22E FC76 E9F7 8A79 028F DA56 7C6C.
Daniel goes to a local school here in Nothern Germany, near where I live. He attends the 9th grade at his school, and as common for students of his age and grade, practical training was scheduled for the last two weeks.
Daniel had originally applied for practical training at some other business near his place of living (which is quite far off from the school, actually). However, that company cancelled his training position two work days before the training was supposed to start. Daniel's teacher rang me up and asked for help. He advertised Daniel as someone who is far advanced in IT topics compared to his co-students.
For those of you, who already thought about joining us in Oslo for our Debian Edu sprint, here comes your short reminder for signing up on this wiki page and then book your travel.
For those of you, who have learned about our upcoming sprint just now, feel heartily invited to meet and join the Debian Edu team (and friends) in Oslo. Check with your family and friends, if they may let you go. Do that now, put your name onto our wiki page and and book your journey.
Those of you, who cannot travel to Oslo, but feel like being interested in Debian and educational topics around Free Software, put a note into your calendar, so you don't forget to join us on IRC over that weekend (and any other time if you like): #debian-edu on irc.debian.org.
Looking forward to meeting you at end of November,
Mike (aka sunweaver)
- By sunweaver at 11/14/2016 - 20:08
Introduction
NX is a software suite which implements very efficient compression of the
X11 protocol. This increases performance when using X applications over a
network, especially a slow one.
NX (v3) has been originally developed by NoMachine and has been Free
Software ever since. Since NoMachine obsoleted NX (v3) some time back in
2013/2014, the maintenance has been continued by a versatile group of
developers. The work on NX (v3) is being continued under the project name
"nx-libs".
Release Announcement
On Thursday, Oct 13th, version 3.5.99.2 of nx-libs has been released [1].
This release brings a major backport of libNX_X11 to the status of libX11 1.3.4 (as provided by X.org). On top of that, all CVE fixes provided for libX11 by the Debian X11 Strike Force and the Debian LTS team got cherry-picked to libNX_X11, too. This big chunk of work has been performed by Ulrich Sibiller and there is more to come. We currently have a pull request pending review that backports more commits from libX11 (bumping the status of libNX_X11 to the state of libX11 1.6.4, which is the current HEAD on the X.org Git site).
Another big clean-up performed by Ulrich is the split-up of XKB code which got symlinked between libNX_X11 and nx-X11/programs/Xserver.
The Background Story
A year ago, or so, I took some time to search the internet for Free Software that can be used for controlling model railways via a computer. I was happy to find Rocrail [1] being one of only a few applications available on the market. And even more, I was very happy when I saw that it had been licensed under a Free Software license: GPL-3(+).
A month ago, or so, I collected my old Märklin (Digital) stuff from my parents' place and started looking into it again after +15 years, together with my little son.
Some weeks ago, I remembered Rocrail and thought... Hey, this software was GPLed code and absolutely suitable for uploading to Debian and/or Ubuntu. I searched for the Rocrail source code and figured out that it got hidden from the web some time in 2015 and that the license obviously has been changed to some non-free license (I could not figure out what license, though).
This made me very sad! I thought I had found a piece of software that might be interesting for testing with my model railway. Whenever I stumble over some nice piece of Free Software that I plan to use (or even only play with), I upload this to Debian as one of the first steps. However, I highly attempt to stay away from non-free sofware, so Rocrail has become a no-option for me back in 2015.
I should have moved on from here on...
Instead...
Proactively, I signed up with the Rocrail forum and asked the author(s) if they see any chance of re-licensing the Rocrail code under GPL (or any other FLOSS license) again [2]?
Introduction
NX is a software suite which implements very efficient compression of the
X11 protocol. This increases performance when using X applications over a
network, especially a slow one.
NX (v3) has been originally developed by NoMachine and has been Free
Software ever since. Since NoMachine obsoleted NX (v3) some time back in
2013/2014, the maintenance has been continued by a versatile group of
developers. The work on NX (v3) is being continued under the project name
"nx-libs".
Release Announcement
On Tuesday, Sep 13th, version 3.5.99.1 of nx-libs has been released [1].
This release brings some code cleanups regarding displayed copyright information and an improvement when it comes to reconnecting to an already running session from an X11 server with a color depths setup that is different from the X11 server setup where the NX/X11 session was originally created on. Furthermore, an issue reported to the X2Go developers has been fixed that caused problems on Windows clients on copy+paste actions between the NX/X11 session and the underlying MS Windows system.
sunweaver sighs...
This short post is to inform all Debian MATE users that the recent GTK-3+ upload to Debian (GTK-3+ v3.21) broke most parts of the MATE 1.14 desktop environment as currently available in Debian testing (aka stretch). This raises some questions here on the MATE maintainers' side...
Questions
Isn't GTK-3+ a shared library? This one was rhetorical... Yes, it is. One that breaks other application with every point release? Well, unfortunately, as experience over the past years has shown: Yes, this has happened several times, so far — and it happened again. Why is it that GTK-3+ uploads appear in Debian without going through a proper transition? This question is not rhetorical. If someone has an answer, please enlighten me.
Potential Counter Measures
For Debian MATE users running on Debian testing: This is untested, but it is quite likely that your MATE desktop environment will work again, once you have reverted your GTK-3+ library back to v3.20. For obtaining old Debian package versions, please visit the https://snapshots.debian.org site.
Prospective
The MATE 1.16 release is expected for Sep 20th, 2016. We will do our best to provide MATE 1.16 in Debian before this month is over. MATE 1.16 will again run smoothly (so I heard) on GTK-3+ 3.21.
light+love
sunweaver (who is already scared of the 3.22 GTK+ release, luckily the last development release of the GTK+ 3-series)
- By sunweaver at 09/07/2016 - 11:21
Preface
This little piece of work has been pending on my todo list for about two years now. For our local school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" I wrote the little tool credential-sheets. It is a little Perl script that turns a series of import files (CSV format) as they have to be provided for user mass import into GOsa² (i.e. LDAP) into a series of A4 sheets with little cards on them, containing initial user credential information.
The upstream sources are on Github and I have just uploaded this little tool to Debian.
Introduction
After mass import of user accounts (e.g. into LDAP) most site
administrators have to create information sheets (or snippets) containing
those new credentials (like username, password, policy of usage, etc.).
With this tiny tool, providing these pieces of information to multiple
users, becomes really simple.
Introduction
NX is a software suite which implements very efficient compression of the
X11 protocol. This increases performance when using X applications over a
network, especially a slow one.
NX (v3) has been originally developed by NoMachine and has been Free
Software ever since. Since NoMachine obsoleted NX (v3) some time back in
2013/2014, the maintenance has been continued by a versatile group of
developers. The work on NX (v3) is being continued under the project name
"nx-libs".
History
Until January 2015, nx-libs was more mainly a redistribution approach of
the original NX (v3) software. We (we as in mainly a group of X2Go
developers) kept changes applied to the original NoMachine sources as
minimal as possible. We also kept the original files and folders
structure. Patches had been maintained via the quilt utility on top of a
Git repository, the patches had always been kept separate. That was the
3.5.0.x series of nx-libs.
In January 2015, the characteristics of nx-libs as maintained by the X2Go
project between 2011 and 2015 changed.
I just did a bundle upload of all MATE 1.14 related packages to Debian unstable. Packages are currently building for the 23 architectures supported by Debian, build status can be viewed on the DDPO page of the Debian MATE Packaging Team [1]
Credits
Again a big thanks to the packaging team. Martin Wimpress again did a fabulous job in bumping all packages towards the 1.14 release series during the last weeks. During last week, I reviewed his work and uploaded all binary packages to a staging repository.
Also a big thanks to Vangelis Mouhtsis, who recently added more hardening support to all those MATE packages that do some sort of C compilation at build time.
After testing all MATE 1.14 packages on a Debian unstable system, I decided to do a bundle upload today. Packages should be falling out of the build daemons within the next couple of hours/days (depending on the architecture being built for).
GTK2 -> GTK3
The greatest change for this release of MATE to Debian is the switch over from GTK2 to GTK3.
People using the MATE desktop environment on Debian systems are invited to test the new MATE 1.14 packages and give feedback via the Debian bug tracker, esp. on the user experience regarding the switch over to GTK3.
Thanks to all who help getting MATE 1.14 in Debian better every day!!!
Known issues when running in NXv3 sessions
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