sunweaver's NET

Having ordered a Jolla smartphone in the last week of September 2015, I already accepted by now that possibly Jolla smartphones don't really exist.

But today (finally!) after six weeks of acceptance... / waiting... I received a mail with the below subject:

    Subject: Jolla Shop: Shipping confirmation for order #500010511

Maybe Jolla smartphones do really exist... Let's see if that phone will be a venerable successor for my beloved N900.

light+love
Mike

For a school customer here in Nothern Germany, I developed another GOsa Add-On this week, the Add-On's name is: Password Management Add-On for GOsa (gosa-plugin-pwreset).

This password management and reset tool allows one to administratively mass-reset user passwords in GOsa based on various approaches.

1. A CSV file can be uploaded containing user IDs and new passwords. The CSV file format for this is: comma-separated, no quotes, two columns (<uid>, <userPassword>).
2. An organizational unit of the LDAP tree can be selected and for all user accounts in that section of the LDAP tree (i.e., the selected OU and all sub-OUs), new passwords can be set. The passwords will get auto-generated when using this approach.
3. Other approach needed? Please get in touch and provide me with a description of your potential use case.

Before passwords are actually changed, the site admin has various options:

• Passwords can be adapted on screen (also the auto-generated passwords).
• Password changes for individual users can be skipped by unticking the user's "Really?" checkbox.
• Expect more features to come...

The source code of this new GOsa Add-On is available on Github [1] and has also been uploaded to Debian's NEW queue already.

light+love
Mike

[1] https://github.com/gosa-project/gosa-plugin-pwreset

Here comes my "monthly" FLOSS report for August and September 2015. As 50% of August 2015 had been dedicated to taking some time off (spending time in Sweden with the family), it happened that even more workload had to be processed in September 2015.

• Completion of MATE 1.10 in Debian testing/unstable and Ubuntu 15.10
• Contribution to Debian LTS, Debian packaging
• Development of GOsa² Plugin SchoolManager
• Automatic builds for Arctica Project
• Forking Unity Greeter as Arctica Greeter (with focus on the remote logon part inside Unity Greeter)

Received Sponsorship

My monthly 8h portion of working for the Debian LTS project I had to dispatch from August into September. Thus, I received 16h of paid work for working on Debian LTS in September 2015. For details, see below. Thanks to Raphael Hertzog for having me on the team [1]. Thanks to all the people and companies sponsoring the Debian LTS Team's work.

The development of GOsa² Plugin SchoolManager (for details, see below) was done on contract for a school in Nothern Germany. The code will be released under the same license as the GOsa² software itself.

Completion of MATE 1.10 in Debian testing/unstable and Ubuntu 15.10

In the first half of September all MATE 1.10 packages finally landed in Debian testing (aka stretch). Martin Wimpress handled most of the packaging changes, whereas my main job was being reviewer and uploader of his efforts. Thanks to John Paul Adrian Glaubitz for jumping in as reviewer and uploader during my vacation time.

I am happy to announce that The Arctica Project can now provide automatic nightly builds of its developers' coding code work.

Packages are built automatically via Jenkins, see [1] for an overview of the current build queues. The Jenkins system builds code as found on our CGit mirror site [2].

NOTE: The Arctica Project's nightly builds may especially be interesting to people that want to try out the latest development steps on nx-libs (3.6.x branch) as we provide nx-libs 3.6.x binary preview builds.

Currently, we only build our code against Debian and Ubuntu (amd64, i386), more distros and platforms are likely to be added. If people can provide machine power (esp. non-Intel based architectures), please get in touch with us on Freenode IRC (channel: #arctica).

This is how you can add our package repositories to your APT system.

Debian APT (here: stretch)

Please note that we only support recent Debian versions (currently version 7.x and above).

$ echo 'deb http://packages.arctica-project.org/debian-nightly stretch main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/arctica.list
$ sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver pgp.mit.edu 0x98DE3101
$ sudo apt-get update

Ubuntu APT (here: trusty)

Please note that we support recent Ubuntu LTS versions only (Ubuntu 14.04 only at the moment).

$ echo 'deb http://packages.arctica-project.org/ubuntu-nightly trusty main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/arctica.list
$ sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver pgp.mit.edu 0x98DE3101
$ sudo apt-get update

Yesterday, I uploaded the last missing piece for fully having MATE Desktop Environment 1.10 in Debian unstable and soon in Debian stretch and Ubuntu 15.10.

Providing MATE in Debian is, in the first place, a team effort. People from four Linux distributions plus the developers from upstream work on providing the MATE experience to the users of Debian.

There are many people to thank. This time I will only mention two of them. Two guys that have worked really hard on the MATE 1.10 release in Debian: Martin Wimpress (from the Ubuntu MATE team, aka flexiondotorg) and Vlad Orlov (from MATE upstream, aka monsta).

May the MATE Desktop Environment be of use to all of you...

light+love,
Mike (aka sunweaver)

During last week, I hacked a new plugin together for GOsa².

Simply quoting parts from debian/control here to inform you on its functionality:

Package: gosa-plugin-mailaddress
Architecture: all
Depends:
 ${misc:Depends},
 gosa (>= 2.7),
Conflicts:
 gosa-plugin-mail,
Description: Simple plugin to manage user mail addresses in GOsa²
 This plugin is a very light-weighted version of the GOsa² mail plugin.
 Whereas gosa-plugin-mail can be used to manage a complete mail server
 farm, this tiny plugin only provides means to modify the user's mail
 address via a text field.
 .
 This plugin is useful for people that need to maintain users' email
 addresses via GOsa², but do not run their own mailserver(s).
 .
 GOsa² is a combination of system-administrator and end-user web
 interface, designed to handle LDAP based setups.

light+love
Mike (aka sunweaver)

July 2015 has been mainly dedicated to these five fields of endeavour:

• Debian Edu rollout at a grammar school (Gymnasium) in Lübeck, Germany
• GOsa² and Debian Edu testing and fixing
• Upgrading a Debian Edu squeeze main server to jessie
• Packaging started to get ILIAS into Debian
• Work on Debian and Debian LTS

Debian Edu rollout at a grammar school (Gymnasium) in Lübeck, Germany

In spring 2015, we got contacted by the IT coordinator of a grammar school (Gymnasium) in Lübeck, Germany. He asked for some consultancy on the existing school network based on Debian and Linux Mint. The school has been running on Linux all-over for the past 5 years (at least, IIRC).

After several phone calls and a personal meeting, the decision was reached to switch over the educational segment of their school IT completely to Debian Edu / Skolelinux.

GOsa² and Debian Edu testing and fixing

This new customer gave us the opportunity of intensively testing Debian Edu jessie. Diverting from previous rollouts, we dropped LibVirt as virtualization technology and switched over to Ganeti. The Debian Edu machines all run in KVM virtual machines.

Our Diskless Workstations and diskfull workstations have been running on Debian Edu jessie plus MATE desktop environment for a while already. But the main servers at other customers' are still on Debian Edu squeeze.

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:

May 2015 has been mainly dedicated to these three fields of endeavour:

• development of nx-libs (3.6.x branch), license clarification of nxcomp (a library in nx-libs)
• contribution to Debian LTS, Debian packaging
• test deployment of Ganeti and Ganeti Manager (a web frontend for Ganeti)

Received Sponsorship

I am happy to report that I received a personal sponsoring over 3.000,- EUR from a sponsor not to be named in May 2015. The sponsoring has been dedicated to supporting my work on The Arctica Project.

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.

Development and License of nx-libs 3.6.x

What has been achieved in May 2015 concerning the nx-libs development?

• nx-libs(-lite) continues to stay DFSG-compliant (see [2] for details)
• Ulrich Sibiller has started working on enabling the RandR based Xinerama extension protocol in nxagent (the prototypes already work quite well) [3]. His work will make it possible to:
  • drop libNX_Xinerama from nx-X11,
  • drop the need of xinerama.conf file that needs to be updated from the client side of the session whenever a RandR change occurs on the client side
  • drop some nasty LD_LIBRARY_PATH hack from x2goruncommand (in X2Go)

We recently had an intensive phase while reconsidering the DFSG-compliancy of the nx-libs(-lite) code base.

TL;DR; In May 2015, all versions of DXPC released before version 3.8.1 (sometime in 2002) have retroactively been re-licensed by all previous maintainers of DXPC as BSD-2-clause.

This blog arcticle is a modified version of the nxcomp/README.on-retroactive-DXPC-license file [1] and gives an overview of the discussion thread that lead to the retroactive re-licensing of DXPC.

For the full discussion, see doc/DXPC_re-licensed::debbug_784565.mbox [2] in the nx-libs source project or #784565 on the Debian bug tracker [3].

[1] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/blob/3.6.x/nxcomp/README.on-re...
[2] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/blob/3.6.x/doc/DXPC_re-license...
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=784565

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STEP 1

In May 2015, a serious license issue around the nxcomp code shipped in this source project was raised and solved on the Debian bug tracker (thanks to Francesco Poli and many others): http://bugs.debian.org/784565

From: "Francesco Poli \(wintermute\)" 
To: Debian Bug Tracking System 
Date: Wed, 06 May 2015 19:35:32 +0200

I noticed that the debian/copyright states:

[...]
| Parts of this software are derived from DXPC project. These copyright
| notices apply to original DXPC code:
|