Tarballs of Ion! — zakame’s blog

I’ve been away from blogging. I’ve been away from doing Debian and Ubuntu work (although there has been a few package updates, as well as a new one.) I’ve been away from a lot of happenings (like how the excellent Knightlust got to convince my fellow townsfolk at Lourdes College Foundation to use FOSS,) but that’s fine, since I know there will be others who can keep up the flame burning.

I’ve been away because I’ve been looking at stuff. Lots of stuff. Various stuff. Stuff like Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and Inferno, and dabbling into distributed computing, working on an implementation of Plan 9’s file protocol. Stuff like thinking about programming, meditating upon it as an art, exercising a discipline of simplicity, clarity and frugality. All that stuff.

I first looked at Plan 9 last March, when I was wanting to go another round at the Google Summer of Code. While I was not selected, just getting Plan 9 to run on my machines (first as a qemu terminal, then as standalone CPU server replacing my old Ubuntu dapper install on my desktop) exposed me to `that other side,’ and that got me thinking about how software ought to be good. Of course, I could have just chosen to drop it all (after all, I wasn’t selected, so…) but I knew that if I stick long enough, I might just learn something.

And yes, I am learning something. Like how a lot of software isn’t really simple, just appearing to be. Or how sophisticated software development methodologies rob the clear picture gained from a well-thought, clear, and simple analysis of problems. Or when push comes to shove, I will have to make a choice, between tolerating software complexity and status quo, or facing it and attempt to simplify it.

Well, there’s much to tell, but I’m lazy, and I’d rather tell stories in bits. Anyway, I think I’ll have some time to spare, especially as I have accepted a new job at an up-and-coming company that, I hope and endeavor, will rock the local and international tech scene. And, while doing that, get around to make great tools to get my job done, and other people’s jobs too.

I’m getting back to the action.

Ok, now that was lame.

Anyway, I’ve just upgraded perlis to Feisty Fawn at the wake of some 1169 MB worth of packages. An apt-get autoclean is therefore in order. I’ve also yet to test hibernation and resume, but knetworkmanager definitely impressed me. Too bad it doesn’t have ifupdown integration yet (which I’ve just done to wlassistant now, pending testing and REVU.)

Just about the only snag I got caught while upgrading was a file overwriting of some .pngs by adept. Since I was upgrading using adept-updater I had to work around using dpkg -i --force-extract and resuming the dist-upgrade using aptitude. I was told in #kubuntu-devel that it will had to be fixed later, and even though I may be able to fix it, it’ll be hard finding a main component sponsor since it’s a weekend. :/

Oh well, life exec()s on. Anyhow I’m too early for upgrade testing (which is on the 8th,) but the outlook for dist-upgrades looks good. And, I’ve other stuff to ponder about, like finishing Philosophy and Procedures 2 of my NM application…

Finally, I’m now on broadband!

I made the move today to Smart Bro as they have been touting a promotion offering free installation and a 384 Kbps connection via their Canopy system. As I’ve been mostly offline (or slightly online, counting the occasional GPRS modem connection on a GSM network) I figured that this is the best way at the moment to get broadband connectivity, as the only DSL choices available locally have been either seriously damaged (due to the last supertyphoon) or excessively priced (with unpredictable foreign-currency adjustments.)

So, needless to say, I’m now enjoying myself with this new investment. Adding to this, I also got a new Netgear WGR614v7 wireless router so I can share the connectivity with perlis. While not exactly as flexible as the famous WRT45G from Linksys, it surely does the job to sharing the Net, so I’ve no complaints about it. And I’ve no complaints about the service offered by Smart Bro, either; the installer did an absolutely good job of making sure that the Canopy SM is on the most receptive direction and even gave me some pointers on what to expect with such a connection. Actually, I’ve already made arrangements about the peeves experienced by other Smart Bro users by taking a cue from Joey Hess by setting up the right service caches and by being not too abusive with my expectations.

But, I still have a lot to expect with this new connection. After all, I still have a few more items on my TODO that needs doing, namely writing about what the hell happened to me since last month until now, and my future directions (erm, resolutions) for this new year. Ah well…

… but first, I need to do some monster dist-upgrades…

BTW: a UMTS (3G) signal has finally been broadcast in Daet, giving me a reason to also have smart-3g as a backup service in case the Canopy goes down. Yipee!

Its the close of September. And just a week ago I turned 16: in hex, that is. Although I do distinctly remember how I wished coming back to being a 16-decimal-year-old then…

So, how does it feel being one? I’ve barely begun to feel it. There has been a lot of distractions to keep me from contemplating too much about $age:

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I was back again at the Parish to continue working on arete, the newly-installed Ubuntu Dapper machine. I was back because I had to continue migrating my father’s files from Windows to the new setup, since he wanted to try out Scribus as a replacement for his MS Publisher system for writing the parish newsletter. Anyhow, this reason, coupled with my own urge to seriously try out Ubuntu Dapper (I was running Kubuntu Dapper, doh) made me spend the whole day trying out something new.

As I was looking at Dad’s documents folder, I realized that I had a problem: there are so many files here, some of them sizing up from tens to hundreds of megs (actually, stuff worked on thru the Gimp,) and knowing well that disk drive space was at a premium (arete had an 80G drive, yes, but nevertheless its already cramped,) I simply couldn’t accept copying the files from the XP’s NTFS C:\ to arete’s ext3 /home. Moving wasn’t an option either; although Dad would very much like to try out Ubuntu, he still had some projects (especially the newletter) that needed, uhm, proprietary software to work (sigh.) Thus, remembering that Linux already had some way of reading NTFS partitions, I promptly Googled about it.

I also knew that the Linux-NTFS guys (who made the ntfsprogs suite and kernel module) were already working on getting full read/write NTFS support on Linux, but it didn’t occur to me that they were able to get a working implementation done so soon…

Enter ntfs-3g: the third generation Linux-NTFS driver. Weighing in at around 550K, this seems to be the one thing that I need for my problem. From the looks of it, ntfs-3g can both read from and write to NTFS partitions, allowing one to create, delete, and update files and directories on the system; it can even allow access to certain metadata that even Windows XP hides from its users. Furthermore, its built from the ground up as a filesystem-in-userspace driver, using the Linux fuse subsystem. It certainly looks very attractive indeed.

So, being the sysadmin for arete that I was, I quickly decided to give ntfs-3g a try. After all, it was a simple matter of grabbing the tarball, then reading the README, then doing the three-step tango of ./configure; make; sudo make install, then calling ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /media/hda1 -o umask=007 as root.

Right?

Wrong. I quickly ran into a trio of subproblems: first, I needed fuse (>= 2.5.0); the one Dapper had on its official archives was 2.4.2 . So, naturally, I had to make a quick backport of the fuse source from Edgy (2.5.3), but I at this point I ran into the second problem: for Eggy’s fuse to get busted, I needed the new makedev (2.3.1) as well. Forgetting to do apt-get -f install for the moment, I grabbed Edgy’s makedev and proceeded backporting it, which ran me against the last problem: I also needed the newest sysvinit (2.86.ds1). In short, I needed to do a trio of backports first before being able to build ntfs-3g. My own fuse was almost ready to explode.

Fortunately, everything went fine after the backports (thank goodness for my being a Debian package maintainer and MOTU,) so I didn’t break my own fuse after all. Soon after, I was reading and writing stuff to and from /media/hda1 without so much as batting an eyelash. Dad was definitely pleased, since that meant that he no longer had to dread the thought of having to maintain two separate document trees and cause him pain and gnashing of teeth. I was glad too, since I no longer had to dread the thought of having to hack on this today, causing me to disrupt my Summer of Code schedule.

But, being the packager that I was, I realized that I could make the world a better(?) place by turning ntfs-3g from a regular Joe source to a real Debian/Ubuntu package. While I was happily waiting for ntfs-3g’s build to complete, I happened to pass by a certain HOWTO on the Web using pre-built fuse and ntfs-3g Ubuntu packages. I grabbed those packages, and took a look at them, and while they were pretty much useful, the ntfs-3g package certainly did not look to pass the gold(?) standards of Debian and Ubuntu: the ntfs-3g package was a single binary package, shipping both a shared library and its headers, coupled with the working binaries. It had outdated FSF addresses too, which my bugging Lintian pointed out to me.

With some more extra time to spare on arete, I decided to go ahead and build proper a proper source package for ntfs-3g, producing the three binary packages ntfs-3g (containing ntfs-3g and mount.ntfs-3g,) libntfs-3g0 (depended on by the former package,) and libntfs-3g-dev (containing the include headers.) CDBS and debhelper definitely made this easy pickings, and made my life with ntfs-3g easier.

And, I’m going to make everyone else’s life with ntfs-3g easier, by making this package available for nit-picking. I won’t pretend this to be getting into the official Debian and/or Ubuntu archives for the moment, since the upstream authors have explicitly stated that ntfs-3g will be eventually merged into the existing ntfsprogs suite, thereby making my packaging of ntfs-3g obsolete sometime soon; furthermore, the binary packages up there are built against Debian unstable and Ubuntu Edgy, so anyone looking for a Dapper solution can read this post first to avoid reinventing the wheel. But if anyone needs a good solution for NTFS read/write right now (or, if somebody else has time to kill in testing ntfs-3g,) then here’s a good one for you. Caveat emptor! 

Ok, next up: finishing my SoC work…

Today I installed Ubuntu Dapper on the old Pentium 4 machine at St John the Baptist Parish. This machine used to be eliza, where I did some Linux-2.6 on Debian Woody baking. But, since this was a milestone of sorts for this system, I decided to rename it to arete, after Socrates’ ideal of the perfect human being (showing my influence to Philo 173.)

As usual, this install was yet another smooth, successful, working-out-of-the-box setup (arete’s HP Deskjet 3745 printer and ATI Radeon 7000 card running perfectly,) with only the Internal D-Link/Conexant modem the only thing needing gcc love.

Tommorow, I’ll set up migrating the old files from my Dad’s Windows partition over to The Excellent Distribution™, and have him explore it, as he plans to move over the newsletter publishing system he set up for the parish (from M$ Publisher) to Scribus.

Hat tip to all the Free Software that made this possible!

Ah, well. I’m such an errant blogger, being focused in doing actual work. But here are some updates:

• Summer Of Code: Sendpage - My code formatting patches have made CVS, and now I’m working on finishing the testsuite. Almost done, hehe
• Debian NM - Still at Philosophy and Procedures 1…
• Ubuntu PH: Picked up where Ealden left off as the PhilippineTeam Leader and LoCoContact, and with Jerome, taking care of the new, Drupal-powered portal for Ubuntu-PH.
• School: I’m loving Philo 173!

In the past few days, I’ve been rather quiet, since I started ripping Sendpage to shreds. After a few days of reading Sendpage::Device and Sendpage::Db, as well as the corresponding design documents, I’ve decided to try coding the few redesign I have been holding up my mind all this time. For now I’m putting my mods inside RCS working with CVS, thanks to Emacs VC-mode.

I’ve put up my first status report for Week 1+. I am also currently dist-upgrading to Dapper, Sid, and Eft chroots… while discovering Perl Design Patterns.


05:42 * zakame can't believe he's building Perl from source
05:43 < ajmitch> sick man


Google’s Summer of Code is on! And I’m a part of it!

I’ll be working with my mentor, Kees Cook, on improving the Sendpage alphanumeric pager software for OSDL’s infrastructure events reporting, especially on getting the various modules of the software communicate clearly, improving the documentation, and updating the packages on Debian, Ubuntu, and others. Hopefully, I’ll be able to fulfill my goals for this project, as well as even extending it further for the long term.

/me is now happily grokking the dead-trees version of the source...

Update: You can see my project proposal.

Heh, almost the end of May and I’ve not a post. Well, that’s going to change

There’s a new version of cvs in unstable, courtesy of Steve McIntyre and Yours Truly, responding to the RFH posted earlier. As a new upstream version, it is supposed to fix a lot of bugs, but it seems that a duo of grave and normal have been found :/ Hopefully those wouldn’t be there for long Along with fixing those bugs, I’ll be checking out the rest of the bugs list and start pinging submitters… Hopefully a good few of the old outstanding bugs will get done.

As for my other packages, gtklp got updated (thanks Nutmeg!) to fix Catalan l10n (thanks Lluis!) and updated the autotools update, as well as its (borked) touch-fu. I also got the new gnome-ppp in, thanks to Paul Cupis. Updates to libungif4 and lua50 will follow shortly.