My FLOSS activities in October 2015

October 2015 has been mainly dedicated to contracted/payed work. Only a few issues I could address during the last month:

  • Fix FTBFS of Arctica Greeter on non-Ubuntu systems
  • Co-working on renewed Xinerama support in nx-libs
  • Development of GOsa² Password Management Add-on
  • Improving Debian Edu main server upgrade documentation (from Debian Edu squeeze to Debian Edu jessie)
  • Fixing my personal Horde Groupware installation for access via mobile devices
  • Learning Dovecot et al.

Arctica Project

While having a week off from work, I managed to get Arctica Greeter to build on non-Ubuntu systems. The issue was very simple. The build crashed during the test suite run and it was caused by the XDG_DATA_DIRS variable not being set in my clean build environment. Furthermore, I added various more session type icons to Arctica Greeter (XFCE, LXDE, MATE, OpenBox, TWM, Default X11 Session, etc.) and also rebased the Arctica Greeter code base against all recent commits found in Unity Greeter for Ubuntu 15.10 / upcoming 16.04.

Together with Ulrich Sibiller, I continued our work on the new Xinerama implementation for the remote X11 server nxagent (used as x2goagent in X2Go). However, this is unfortunately still work in progress, because various theoretical monitor layout issues became evident that require being handled in the new code before it can get merged into nx-libs's current 3.6.x branch.

Also, I managed to do some little work on https://arctica-project.org, the still too rudimentary project homepage.

Work on GOsa²

A new simple add-on for GOsa has been born during last month: gosa-plugin-pwreset [1] (already available in Debian testing/unstable).

That new plugin helps with maintaining user passwords. It can be used to mass reset user password with a few clicks. The add-on is targeted for schools using GOsa for administrating users and systems.

More info can be found in a previous blog post [2].

Also, I have uploaded two new package versions of the gosa package to Debian testing/unstable [3,4] shipping various fixes / patches.

(Unofficial) Debian Edu upgrade documentation

For another local customer we did another Debian Edu mainserver upgrade from Debian Edu squeeze to Debian Edu jessie. During this upgrade process, I improved our not-yet official upgrade documentation [5].

Horde5 in Debian and Mobile Device Support

For another customer I looked into the reason for Horde in Debian not supporting mobile devices so well. The reason behind it is that Horde5 expects a jquery-mobile 1.3.x. The API/ABI in jquery-mobile 1.4.x has changed and is not suitable for usage with Horde5. However, in Debian the problem is different: jquery-mobile is still at version 1.2.x which is too old for Horde5 to provide a smart experience on mobile devices.

Learning Dovecot...

For again another customer I set up a new mailserver running Postfix, Dovecot, Amavis (with SpamAssassin and SOPHOS AV). This was the first time ever that I worked with Dovecot and I must say that I quite like that IMAP/POP3/et.al. server application.

Debian LTS work

My portion of Debian LTS work has been dispatched from October to November 2015. In my next FLOSS report (Novembre 2015) you will very probably find more information on my Debian LTS and Debian-in-general related work.

light+love
Mike

[1] https://github.com/gosa-project/gosa-plugin-pwreset
[2] https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/22
[3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2015/10/msg01241.html
[4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2015/10/msg02026.html
[5] https://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/Technik/Installation/VM/HauptServerTje...