June 2015 has been mainly dedicated to these five fields of endeavour:
- first uploads of MATE 1.10 to Debian experimental (still work in progress)
- development of nx-libs (3.6.x branch)
- meeting other nx-libs developers at X2Go: The Gathering 2015 at Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany
- contribution to Debian and Debian LTS,
- production deployment of Ganeti and Ganeti Manager (a web frontend for Ganeti)
Received Sponsorship
Last month's contributions of mine (8h) to the Debian LTS project had been contracted by Freexian [1] again. Thanks to Raphael Hertzog for having me on the team. Thanks to all the people and companies sponsoring the Debian LTS Team's work.
Also a big thanks to people from Hetzner GmbH for sponsoring my stay at X2Go: The Gathering 2015 @ Linuxhotel (in Essen, Germany).
MATE 1.10 entering Debian experimental
Together with Martin Wimpress from Ubuntu MATE and other people in the Debian MATE Packaging Team I managed to upload a great portion of the MATE 1.10 packages to Debian experimental.
Please note that this is still work in progress. Not all MATE 1.10 packages have been uploaded yet and several packages from the MATE 1.10 series in Debian have grave bugs still (mostly packaging and installation issues).
The plan is to make the complete MATE 1.10 stack available in Debian experimental by the end of July and also get all the open kinks fixed by then.
Development nx-libs 3.6.x
In June 2015, I have looked at various aspects of nx-libs development:
- Backporting Xrandr proto extension to the nxagent Xserver
- Moving NX'specific code away from the bundle libX11 & co libraries
- Replacing
include headers by includes - Addressing crashes in NX's Xrender code that leads to crashes if huge anti-antialising fonts are to be displayed in an nxagent session.
All named issues are still work in progress and I hope to present viable patches / pull requests in July 2015.
Work on Debian and Debian LTS
For Debian, I started working through the list of maintained packages of mine and get newer upstream releases into Debian (e.g. python-pampy; zypper, libzypp and libsolv; x2goclient; etc.).
For the Debian LTS team I have been doing 8h of contracted work in June 2015 (and at the beginning of July 2015). The work focused on:
- getting libxml2 finally uploaded to squeeze-lts [2]
- security upload of pykerberos [3]
- security upload of virtualbox-ose [4]
- address and discuss a weakness in the DLA number requesting workflow (together with Raphael Hertzog) [5]
Get togeher of nx-libs developers at X2Go: The Gathering 2015 @ Linuxhotel
From 19th June until 21st June, various concurrent developers of nx-libs (a remote X11 solution) came together at "X2Go: The Gathering 2015 @ Linuxhotel" [6]. Thanks to Stefan Baur from BAUR-ITCS UG for organizing this event.
I was very happy that three developers from the TheQVD project [7] (Nito Martinez, Nicolas Arenas Alonso and Salvador Fandiño) could make it to the gathering, as well. Recently, people from TheQVD, people from X2Go and people from the (new) Arctica Project have joined forces in maintaing nx-libs together.
For nx-libs 3.6.x the goal is that all three different software solutions will base on the same nx-libs code base.
On the social, as well as on the technical level, this get-together has been a gorgeous event and it once more convinces me of the benefits of Free and Libre Software. This cooperation would be much more difficult - if even possible at all - if nx-libs was a closed source, proprietary product.
Deploying Ganeti
Quite a portion of the second half of June I spent on a customer contract that allowed me to do a production deployment of Ganeti.
I really got fond of this virtualization product and am looking forward to do more Ganeti related (contracted) work.
I also plan to help with the development of Ganeti Manager from time to time.
Light+Love
Mike Gabriel (aka sunweaver)
[1] https://www.freexian.com/en/services/debian-lts.html
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/07/msg00004.html
[3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/07/msg00003.html
[4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2015/07/msg00006.html
[5] https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts/2015/07/msg00010.html
[6] http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/events:x2go-gathering-2015
[7] http://theqvd.com/