peter.makholm.net

Debian includes a package called “vrms - virtual Richard M. Stallman” which report the non-free packages you have installed on your Debian system. Running vrms on my workstations gives the following output:

makholm@makholm:~$ vrms
              Non-free packages installed on makholm

gcc-4.2-doc               documentation for the GNU compilers (gcc, gobjc, g++)
gcc-doc-base              several GNU manual pages
sun-java6-bin             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
sun-java6-jre             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
sun-java6-plugin          The Java(TM) Plug-in, Java SE 6
xsnow                     Brings Christmas to your desktop

  6 non-free packages, 0.4% of 1487 installed packages.
makholm@makholm:~$

Sun Java is a know evil and somebody really ought to reimplement xsnow, but having the virtual RMS declare GNU documentation non-free is a nice touch. Yeah, I know about the problems with GFDL.

Update: Known problem: #221807, #297506, and #364971

The day before yesterday I uploaded ack to Debian Unstable. Currently it is awaiting the ftp-masters acceptance. Due to a name confilct with an existing package both the package and the util is named ack-grep. Not quite optimal…

Instead of maintaining dependencies and some of my other perl modules I have decided to join the Debian Perl Group. So this evening I have spend injecting (and re-injecting) my current perl modules into the subversion repository.

Later I might inject my other packages to collab-maint’s subversion repository.

Working with subversion I’ve had a bit trouble making project wide search and replaces. find -name '*.pm' | xargs perl 's/foo/bar/g' breaks a subversion working copy in not so subtle ways and grep’ing returns duplicate results. I gave up making the correct find statement in five minutes and installed ack. What a useful utility.

Marc-André Lureau has ITP’ed it and it’s dependencies but hasn’t got anything uploaded yet. I offered to sponsor but havn’t recieved a respons yet and I’m impatient so I’ve rolled out my own packages, renaming ack to ack-grep to avoid name clashes with the existing ack package.

Either download ack-grep_1.66-1_all.deb and libfile-next-perl_1.00-1_all.deb or use the following in you sources.list:

deb http://hacking.dk/debs sid main
deb-src http://hacking.dk/debs sid main

Still willing to either sponsor or maintaining the package myself.

A good read eval print loop for perl has been on my Wanted list for a long time. Matt S Trout’s Devel::REPL has been looking promissing but I didn’t want to fiddle with installing the dependencies. Thanks to Alexis Sukrieh and the Debian Perl Group Devel::REPL will enter unstable. Yeahhh…

Another thing on my wanted list was Debian packages of Perl::Critic. Couldn’t find a ITP, but looking around at the Debian Perl Group’s website to find out how to package it I discovered that Joey Hess allready did the work.

I’ve been using the morning installing the above from the subversion repository on pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org. Only problem was that I needed a newer package of libppi-perl which wasn’t maintained in subversion.

What’s next? Looking at my ~/.perl Perl::Tidy seems to be a candidate.

4. Our priorities are pancakes and beer

   We will be guidede by our need for pancakes and (preferable free) beer. We will place this interest first in our priorities. We wil support the needs of our users for knowledge of where to get many different kinds of pancakes and beers. We will not object to other kind of food and drinks, but pancakes and beer are our main common interesst and priorities. In furtherance of this need, we will provide guidance to beer and pancakes all over the world near and far away from Denmark.

For some reason the celebration of the Debian Social Contract was centered on Denmark. So I thought we might as well organize something in Denmark for real (some of us had talked about it some days ago).

We have yet to decide if our main priority is beer or pancake so the plans aren’t quite final yet. Ølbaren has been mentioned. If you are interested in joining contact me. (Update: Ølbaren is closed for the month)

My first uploads to Debain since Etch was declared frozen for real. A minor new upstream version of slashem with ubuntu patches and new debconf translations and a relative larger upstream version of inotify-tools.

My Debian todo-list: making lib-packages for inotify-tools, looking af raop-play, and then give the slashem packaging some love.

One step nearer removing OS X form my iBook. Now I got java running so I can log on to my net banking account. The following works on my Debian Etch (-ish):

1. Download IBM’s java-package from http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/linux/download.html (registration required) - you need the 32bit iSeries/pSeries version in tgz format
2. Make sure that the package includes …/jre/bin/libjavaplugin_oji.so (somehow I got a package which didn’t have the file)
3. install java-package
4. run make-jpkg <tgz file>. If it complain about “no matching plugin was found” look in /usr/share/doc/java-package/SUPPORTED and rename you tgz file to something supporte of almost the correct version.
5. Install the resulting package and restart firefox (whatever it is named today)

I downloaded a file called ibm-java2-jre-5.0-4.0-linux-ppc.tgz and renamed it to ibm-java2-jre-50-linux-ppc.tgz and it seems to work.

I took some days off-line so the iBook story hasn’t progressed very much. On the other hand I’ve spent some time with my family and finaly finished Neil Stephenson’s Quicksilver.

Sound

Had some problems with the internal soundcard. I’m not quite sure what the porblem was, but the right module is snd_powermac and not anything like snd_aoa. Probaly did something else wrong along the way too.

The fun part would be playing music throug AirTunes. raop-play claims to solve this problem. They got debian packages for i386 and a nice debian/ in the source tar-ball. The build-deps is missing fluid and libglib2.0-dev but other than that it builds nicely — but no sound…

Nearly giving up I looked at the alsapcm module not part of the debian package, just to see how it worked in theory. And suddenly I could play music with mplayer -ao alsa:device=hw=1.0 music.ogg. Problem is that raop-play isn’t endian safe, but the alsapcm module forces use of little endian somewhere before the real raop-play.

Afterward I’ve tested raop-play on amd64 where it works nicely.

Java

Java seems to be a problem. None of the packages of ibm-jre packages I’m seem to be able to find is supported by java-package. My Bank uses java, so that is kind of a show stopper, but I havn’t really looked into it yet.

Flash, Youtube and the like

Flash isn’t really a showstopper, but it would be nice to be able to see all the funny video clips people are refering to. None of the free flash plugins seems to work (swfdec, libfalsh-mozplugin), but youtube-dl and mplayer do the job.

Futher work…

Java is a major show stopper. I can’t switch for real without java support in my browser. The other problems is something I can live with. I migth even prefer to use AirTunes from my amd64 server instead of my laptop so I will probally ITP raop-play soon.

Some people have asked why I want to switch away from wonderfull OS X. I’ll try to wirte something up one of the days - and no it’s is not anything personal against mac fans.

My previous post generated a lot of useful comments. Some of them was about using the synaptics trackpad driver. Unfortunately it only works, as Itai Seggev says, on post July 2005 iBooks and my iBook seems to be from August 2004 (this fact took me a long time to realize).

I found an adbsyn howto wich seems to have an solution. Using a kernel patch and a patch for xserver-xorg-input-synaptics you can get the ADB Trackpad to simulate a synaptics trackpad. So for the first time i a very long time I get to compile a kernel…

After a very long time I get to reboot into my new patched kernel and, lo and behold, synaptics works. In the beginning i didn’t seem to work, I had a very low acceleration set but with some fiddling I got it ajusted to something useable. So for enabling synaptics on older ibooks, see: http://www.cs.unibo.it/~bigoi/howto.htm

In the meantime I got glxgears turning smoothly. Now I can start compiz and see a wobly effect when I move windows around, but then compiz freezes the display. Most of the times I seem to be able to terminate the xserver, but i’ve reboted once.

Steps to get OpenGL working:

• change Driver "fbdev" to Driver "radeon" in the Monitor section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf
• apt-get install libgl-mesa-dri

About two years ago I bought a new laptop. I wanted a unix without messing around with drivers for graphics and wireless, so I choose a Apple iBook with OS X. I havn’t regretted but the inflexibilities of Apples user interface is a burden. So I’m playing with installing Debian on a Firewire-drive.

The installation (etch debian-installer RC2) worked fine until the installation of yaboot (the lilo and grub equivalent on powerpc). Google knew the solution: http://howtoforge.org/boot_debian_from_external_firewire (not really, Google found the same howto somewhere else). Problem number two was network: My wireless uses WPA-PSK and I don’t have a free cabled connection. More googling: wpa_supplicant was the solution but it wasn’t on the netinstall cd. Boot into OS X and download wpa_supplicant and some other usefull packages. Problem solved.

So now I have a firewire-drive with a pretty basic Debian install with X11 running. But I actually used 2 Apple applications (Safari and iTunes) and 2 other pieces of Apple hardware (iPod and Airport Express).

Safari is a minor problem, I just have to convince myself that my banking is just as (un)suportted with Firefox as it is with Safari. More interesting is the iTunes/iPod/Airport Express problems. iTunes is easily replaced by xmms but I really likes playing music through AirTunes and I need to keep my iPod updated. So it will porbally take some nore evenings to get completely rid of OS X.

And the I need two more mouse buttons…

Update 2007-04-16: Changed link to boborosso’s howto as requested in the comments.