On Tuesday, late afternoon, at DebConf17, I offered an ad-hoc BoF about the current status of the MATE Desktop packaging efforts in Debian and Ubuntu. I need to get this written down, before DebConf17 feels too far away...
Unfortunately, I scheduled that BoF with Joey Hess's talk about his post-Debian life, which attracted many people. So, only a small group of people came together to share and discuss about the current status of MATE in Debian and Ubuntu.
Ongoing efforts around MATE in Debian and Ubuntu
A quick summary of ongoing efforts was provided and also a collection of URLs for reporting bugs, looking up packaging status, etc. was listed:
Cross-Distro Packaging Workflow
The workflow of Debian and Ubuntu packaging in the MATE Packaging Team was described in detail (basically, all packages go through Debian, only exception being freeze states of this or that distro) and the benefit of the close cooperation between the two projects underlined. We reduce the packaging effort tremendously by working very closely together.
On Thursday at DebConf17, all people interested in using this or that Remote Desktop solution on Debian (as a server, as a client, as both) came together for a BoF.
Sharing about Usage Scenarios
Quite some time we informally shared with one another what technologies and software we use for remote access to Debian machines and what the experiences are.
The situation in Debian and on GNU/Linux in general is that many technical approaches exist, all of them have certain features and certain limitations. The composition of features and limitations finally lead the users to choosing one or another technology as his or her favourite solution.
The Debian Remote Maintainers Team
On the developers' side, Dominik George and I set up a packaging team for Remote Desktop related software in Debian. A packaging team that we invite everyone who is maintaining such software in the widest sense to join: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-remote-team%40lists.alioth...
'DebianRemote' namespace on the Debian Wiki
For users of Debian, the group agreed, we need an overview page (on wiki.debian.org) that provides an entry point for Debian on the Remote Desktop. An entry point that provides user information as well as developer information.
A skeleton of this wiki page, I have just set up (thanks to Vagrant for taking some notes in Gobby during the BoF): https://wiki.debian.org/DebianRemote
However, the page still contains loads of FIXMEs, so the actual work only now really starts.
People I Met and will Remember
- Angela, my wife, I met daily on Jabber. Thanks for letting me go to this great DebConf17 conference
and keeping our family up and running
- Andreas asking people to either impersonate his wife or adoptive daughter for a photo shooting.
You gave such a touching talk on Friday, together with Minh from Vietnam.
- Holger for nagging us about stone age bugs in the Debian Blends package and the outdated
software list in Debian Edu (Kernel 2.6.32 package are finally not mentioned anymore)
- Vagrant, Foetini and Alkis for there efforts on LTSP and their success in Greece with bringing
Debian into Greek schools
- Tiago, Jerome and all the others from the local team, providing us with such great food and support.
On last Tuesday, I gave a 20 min talk about Ayatana Indicators at DebConf 17 in Montreal.
Ayatana Indicators Talk
The talk had video coverage, so big thanks to the DebConf video team for making it possible to send the below video link around to people in the world:
http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2017/debconf17/ay...
The document of notes shown in the video is available on Debian's Infinote (Gobby) server:
$ sudo apt-get install gobby
$ sudo gobby infinote://gobby.debian.org/debconf17/talk/ayatana-indicators
The major outcome of this talk was getting to know Dimitri John Ledkov from the Foundation Team at Canonical Ltd. We agreed on investigating the following actions, targetting the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release and later on Debian 10 (aka buster):
Upstream Todos
- We need to find out what indicator applets are still needed (already there: application, session, power; w-i-p: messages, not yet touch: sound, datetime, transfer). If you maintain a desktop environment and need indicator support, please contact us.
- Rip-out liburl-dispatcher and Mir related code from all ayatana-indicator-* code projects (upstream)
- Build-time disable phone and tablet related code (upstream).
Last Monday, I gave a 20min talk about our little FLOSS school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" at the Debian Conference 17 in Montreal.
The talk had video coverage, so may want to peek in, if you couldn't manage to watch the life stream:
http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2017/debconf17/su...
I'd like to share some major outcomes (so far) of this talk.
- I realized how attached I am to "IT-Zukunft Schule" and how much it means to me that our kids grow up in a world of freedom and choice. Also and esp. when it comes to choosing your daily communication tools and computer working environment
- I met Foteini Tsiami and Alkis Georgopoulos from Greece. They work on LTSP and have deployed 1000+ schools in Greece with LTSP + Debian GNU/Linux + MATE Desktop Environment
- I met Vagrant Cascadian who is the maintainer of LTSP in Debian and also a major LTSP upstream contributor
- I received a lot of fine feedback that was very encouraging to go on with our local work in Schleswig-Holstein
If you have some more time for watching DebConf talks on video, I dearly recommend the talk given by Alkis and Foteini on their Greek FLOSS success story.
In the near future various upstream projects related to the Ubuntu desktop experience as we have known it so far may become only sporadically maintained or even fully unmaintained. Ubuntu will switch to the Gnome desktop environment with 18.04 LTS as its default desktop, maybe even earlier. The Application Indicators [1] brought into being by Canonical Ltd. will not be needed in Gnome (AFAIK) any more. We can expect the Application Indicator related projects become unmaintained upstream. (In fact I have recently been offered continuation of upstream maintenance of libdbusmenu).
Historical Background
This all started at Ubuntu Developer Summit 2012 when Canonical Ltd. announced Ubuntu to become the successor of Windows XP in business offices. The Unity Greeter received an Remote Login Service enhancement: since then it supports Remote Login to Windows Terminal Servers. The question came up, why Remote Login to Linux servers--maybe even Ubuntu machines--is not on the agenda. It turned out, that it wasn't even a discussable topic. At that time, I started looking into the Unity Greeter code, adding support for X2Go Logon into Unity Greeter. I never really stopped looking at the greeter code from time to time.
Since then, it turned into some sort of a hobby... While looking into the Unity Greeter code over the past years and actually forking Unity Greeter as Arctica Greeter [2] in September 2015, I also started looking into the Application Indicators concept just recently.
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 Friday, May 5th 2017, version 3.5.99.7 of nx-libs has been
released
[1].
Credits
A special thanks goes to Ulrich Sibiller for tracking down a regression
bug that caused a tremendously slowed down keyboard input on high latency
connections. Thanks for that!
Another thanks goes to the Debian project for indirectly providing us
with so many build platforms. We are nearly at the point where nx-libs
builds on all architectures supported by the Debian project. (Runtime
stability is a completely different issue, we will get to this soon).
Changes between 3.5.99.6 and 3.5.99.7
- Include Debian patches, re-introducing GNU/Hurd and GNU/kFreeBSD support.
Thanks to various porters on #debian-ports and #debian-hurd for feedback
(esp.
After having waited for about four months, I received an official mail from office (at) ccc.de today, containing my personal chaos number and initial membership payment information and all...
\o/ .oO( Yipppieehhh )
Money has immediately been transfered, so club joining should be complete by tomorrow.
Blogged by a highly delighted...
... sunweaver
Often I get asked: How can I test the latest nx-libs packages [1] with a stable version of X2Go Server [2] on non-Debian, but Debian-like systems (e.g. Ubuntu, Mint, etc.)?
This is quite easy, if you are not scared of building binary Debian packages from Debian source packages. Until X2Go Server (and NXv3) will be made available in Debian unstable, the brave testers should follow the below installation recipe.
Step 1: Add Debian experimental as Source Package Source
Add Debian experimental as source package provider (and immediately install the Debian Archive Keyring package):
$ echo "deb-src http://httpredir.debian.org/debian experimental main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-experimental.list
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install debian-archive-keyring
$ sudo apt-get update
Step 2: Obtain Build Tools and Build Dependencies
When building software, you need to have some extra packages. Those packages will not be needed at runtime of the built piece of software, so you may want to take some notes on what extra packages get installed with the below step. If you plan rebuilding X2Go Server and NXv3 several times, then simply leave the build dependencies installed:
$ sudo apt-get build-dep nx-libs
$ sudo apt-get build-dep x2goserver
Step 3: Build NXv3 and X2Go Server from Source
Building NXv3 (aka nx-libs) takes a while, so it may be time to get some coffee now... The build process should not run as superuser root.
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 Friday, Apr 21st 2017, version 3.5.99.6 of nx-libs has been
released
[1].
As some of you might have noticed, the release announcements for 3.5.99.4
and 3.5.99.5 have never been posted / written, so this announcement lists
changes introduced since 3.5.99.3.
Credits
There are alway many people to thank, so I won't mention all here. The
person I need to mention here is Mihai Moldovan, though. He virtually is
our QA manager, although not officially entitled. The feedback he gives
on code reviews is sooo awesome!!! May you be available to our project
for a long time.
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