Tarballs of Ion! — zakame’s blog

Tomorrow I’ll be off to Brisbane, Australia to attend the Open Source Developers’ Conference. My thanks to the UNDP-APDIP International Open Source Network and the OSDC organizers for selecting me to participate in their Exchange Grants! I thought I wasn’t going to make it, though, as the notice from IOSN came rather late, and I had to get my (first ever) visa at the last minute. (Now, if only I can find a good place to stay for the nights. Can anyone suggest a few?

I hope to see some fellow Perl mongers, Debian users, and Ubunteros and learn a lot from this experience. OSDC here I come!

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!

Ubuntu-PH Release Party for 6.10 (Edgy Eft), originally uploaded by zakame.

Last night I called Ubunteros nearby Manila for the Edgy Eft (belated) release party at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at Greenbelt 3. Little did I know that there will be a lot of folks coming from the just-concluded FOSS@work workshop joining in the fun, thanks to Yolynne Medina and Eric Pareja.

Diane Gonzales and I got to the venue first, then followed by the FOSS@Work folks. Dominique Cimafranca, Migs Paraz, Ranulf Goss, Jopes Gallardo, and Joel Bryan Juliano were there too, and all in all we were easily the noisiest group in the coffee shop, seemingly occupying the entirety of the place. I originally planned to move the group to have dinner somewhere, but along the way everybody seemed to forgot dinner and we quite engaged in talking to everyone else. It was terrific.

The 2 boxes of Edgy {,K,Ed}Ubuntu CDs I brought were easily given away to everyone; we even had them exchanged and autographed (naks!) reminiscent of what Ealden and I did last February when Mark came here. As a finale, we had a group photo of everyone with their CDs; Dominique remarks that in his `informal’ study, more and more women prefer Ubuntu (and I sure do think he’ll be blogging more about this soon.

Needless to say, the above photo doesn’t do great justice to what happened last night; it came from my elric which I didn’t get use much as a camera since I too was happily chatting away. That said, I expect RJ Ian will be posting his photos from his brand-spanking-new Kodak camera to the Ubuntu-PH site once he gets back to Mindanao with Yolynne and company. I also think the FOSS@Work folks also have their own photosite or wiki to post more photos, which we’ll be seeing sooner.

Jerome Gotangco and Ealden Escañan, the guys whom we all owe Ubuntu-PH to, were unfortunately unable to attend last night, as Jerome was off to Cebu to participate in the ICT congress there, while Ealden was quite busy at work. Hopefully they (as well as last night’s attendees!) can attend the next Release Party for 7.04 (aka Feisty Fawn,) and hopefully it will be just as fun, and be more meaningful if more Ubuntu-PH folks get involved in its development!

Update: Yolynne and RJ just posted pics fresh from their arrival to home. Expect more pics later, nicely tagged too…

Following up, I have found a solution in a related bugreport against initramfs-tools that needed a one-line edit and the above spell for 610 GET.

My reward: Gomen Cat. Its a Caturday.

… to Mountain View, California, for the Ubuntu Developer Summit, thanks to Gobby! =) I’ve yet to set up VoIP though…

…is yes, rather Edgy.

Yesterday:

apt-get --download-only dist-upgrade    # grab pkgs at work
apt-get dist-upgrade                    # go home and do the dist-upgrade
apt-get dselect-upgrade                 # WTF?!? I had a lot of held-back pkgs?!?
                                        # Seems dselect-upgrade is more aggressive...
apt-get install xserver-xorg            # Funny apt-get tried to sneak away
                                        # my xserver-xorg (I lost it after dist-upgrade)
aptitude dist-upgrade                   # Hmmm, perhaps even better than
                                        # dselect-upgrade...

Today: (I ran out of Smart 3G prepaid credits last night :/)

apt-get update                  # Hmmm, apt's rather verbose lately
                                # with locales and stuff
apt-get install kubuntu-desktop # Heh, somehow I figured that was missing...

After all this, I seem to have a completely-upgraded Kubuntu system now (verified by doing {dist-,dselect-,}upgrade again,) despite the lack of a proper updating tool for Kubuntu (Ubuntu has its own Update Manager.) Still, FWIW I had to go through some hoops along the way (like all those multiple dist-upgrade invocations; I’ve done that before (twice) on the Breezy -> Dapper path, but thrice on Dapper -> Edgy? Just, wow…) but I got to learn some new stuff too (like pairing perlis and elric (my new 3G phone) via Bluetooth on the console.

However, if I was in a hurry, I would have just e2mkfs‘d my partitions and started over. But then again, would I have had to move from Dapper to Edgy if I wanted to do that install dance all over again?

Granted, the upgrade process needs some improvement: either elevate `dist-upgrade’ capabilities to an even higher, godlike status, or make use of a different upgrader (dselect and aptitude does seem to have the upper `edge’ compared to apt-get…)

I guess there’s still some advantage of me not following the Edgy development process too closely (SoC, getting a new job, and school makes such a busy mix but I’d love to jump back again in Feisty, now that I do have the means to follow development more closely.

Update: Looks like the dist-upgrades corrupted my swap partition, preventing me to do hibernates. A mkswap, followed by the subsequent edit in /etc/fstab and a reboot, fixed that.

Update 2: Seems hibernate still doesn’t work (although suspend to RAM works absolutely fine.) A look of the resume process seems to show similarities between this bug, but I’ve yet to confirm.

Update 3: I have found a workaround to this hibernate issue by rebooting with the `ro’ flag removed from the kernel command line, then adding a `resume=/dev/hdaX’ or `resume=UUID=XXXXXX’. Upon further investigation, it also appears that my swap partition doesn’t get corrupted at all; what seems to happen is that the kernel or `swapon’ doesn’t recognize it on the next boot, thus failing with an `Invalid argument.’

Right. Ubuntu 6.10 has been out for sometime now. Go dist-upgrade!

Or get the DVD image, as I’m doing now via rsync diff-update. It appears that CD images aren’t available at cdimage.ubuntu.com yet, but it doesn’t matter since I had the previous Beta DVD image on hand and I can just do the rsync dance.

But I really should take my own advice and dist-upgrade; I haven’t done so since I’ve been pretty much content with Kubuntu Dapper running smoothly between hibernates. I know I will have to dist-upgrade though, since the Ubuntu-PH LoCoTeam will have a Release Party in a couple of weeks, just in time for the arrival of Edgy pressed CDs, and we definitely would want to show off a fresh {,Ed,K,X}ubuntu Edgy by then I just need a venue, a time, and a couple of drinks; suggestions, anyone?

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:

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