Weekly report 2005-08-22
About time I let you all know what I have been doing lately. Here is
a small report. I didn't write the lot as things happen, so I
probably forgot something. Not all of this is relevant for
skolelinux, but I included it for completeness.
- I've spent some hours working with Vagrant Cascadian and Matt
Zimmerman improving the Ubuntu based LTSP and making it ready for
Debian. It is now booting just fine in qemu, and X autodetection
and encrypted login (ldm) work just fine. The initial package was
rejected by the ftp-masters, and we need to find a solution to the
detected problem to get it into Debian. Discussion continue on
<ltsp-developer@lists.sourceforge.net>. Check out
<URL:http://wiki.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/MueKow> if you want
to test the new LTSP.
- Java is quite important for the educational sector, and I assisted
the debian-java subproject with a few package uploads as part of
the work on moving packages from contrib to main (meaning getting
the packages to work with free software JVMs and fixing classpath
in the process).
I've also been working with the free software Java community in
organizing a development gathering, and a proposal is written and
almost ready to go to possible sponsors.
<URL:http://java.debian.net/index.php/DevJam>. Kurt Gramlich will
take care of the organizing, and Andreas Schuldei is giving advice.
- Spend some time with OpenStreetmap.org last week, uploading more of
the vast dataset I got for the Oslo area. Still ~2 million GPS
points left to upload, but the server ran into problems and I
decided to stop. Nice to see the new stats for the dataset,
<URL:http://www.openstreetmap.org/stats/data_stats.html>
- A few days ago, I finally found a tool capable of adding GPS
coordinates into JPEG images, Image::ExifTool - debin package
libimage-exiftool-perl. I plan to use it to geo-reference my
digital photo collection, and use it to make photo galleries. Did
not find the tools I needed, so I started on a collection of
scripts to do the work. Available from
<URL:http://developer.skolelinux.no/~pere/gis/geophoto/>.
- A few days ago, as part of the LTSP work, I started looking into
optimizing the boot time in Debian. Checking out initng and
concluding that it did not meet my requirements (it uses its own
set of init.d scripts instead of the ones included in packages), I
had a look at the ini.td dependency headers specified in Linux
Software Base, and tools to use them. Found a tool from SuSe,
insserv, capable of updating /etc/rc#.d/* symlinks based on this
dependency information, and tested this on my LTSP client to speed
up the process. Also came up with a minor change to
/etc/init.d/rc* to run scripts in parallell. I believe this have
some merit, and will continue this work as part of the
<URL:http://alioth.debian.org/projects/initscripts-ng/> project.
- I worked a bit on xdebconfigurator bugs, fixing a few, reassigning
a few and closing a few leftover ones. Uploaded a new version
fixing some of the bugs, and including LSB headers in the init.d
script.
- The SLX Debian Labs foundation had a meeting on Monday discussing
how to organize the support market for schools in the future. Did
not agree on anything yet, but had a useful discussion.
- Organized a meeting for the members of NUUG in Oslo, where Hikernet
was presented. Also followed up the administration of the prize
for progressing free software in Norway. It is being handed out by
Mark Shuttleworth in Oslo 2005-10-04, and there is still lots to
get in place.
- In a hope to get OpenGL working properly on my Sarge laptop, and
also to test how hard it is to backport X.org from sid to sarge, I
n gave it a go. It had some versioned build-dependencies I tried
to ignore, but the build failed because some API changed in the
libraries in question. I will need to look into this some more.
- A new kernel with support for SATA and other hardware is needed in
debian-edu/sarge. To test if it is simple to use the 2.6.12
kernels directly from unstable, I tested the binary packages on
several of my machines. It worked as it should out of the box on
two of them, and worked fairly ok on thinkpad X30 and T30. Sound
is broken on the X30 and T30 though, so it is not working
flawlessly. :/
At my paid daytime job at the university, lots of other stuff went on,
mostly with request-tracker extentions and adjustments. I choose to
ignore it in this mail. :)
I hope to find time to send more frequently updates to this list on my
current progress with debian-edu, and urge the rest of you in the
project to do the same. :)
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