Debian
What goes into default Debian?
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 25th of February 2021 07:11:17 AM Filed under
The venerable locate file-finding utility has long been available for Linux systems, though its origins are in the BSD world. It is a generally useful tool, but does have a cost beyond just the disk space it occupies in the filesystem; there is a periodic daemon program (updatedb) that runs to keep the file-name database up to date. As a recent debian-devel discussion shows, though, people have differing ideas of just how important the tool is—and whether it should be part of the default installation of Debian.
There are several variants of locate floating around at this point. The original is described in a ;login: article from 1983; a descendant of that code lives on in the GNU Find Utilities alongside find and xargs. After that came Secure Locate (slocate), which checks permissions to only show file names that users have access to, and its functional successor, mlocate, which does the same check but also merges new changes into the existing database, rather than recreating it, for efficiency and filesystem-cache preservation. On many Linux distributions these days, mlocate is the locate of choice.
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Debian: Firebird, Tutanota Desktop on Sparky, and Steinar H. Gunderson's Project in LWN
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 20th of February 2021 03:44:21 AM Filed under
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Firebird 4.0 RC1 Docker image based on Debian buster is released
You can use and test Firebird 4.0 RC1 Docker image based on Debian buster
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Tutanota Desktop
There is a new application available for Sparkers: Tutanota Desktop
What is Tutanota?
Tutanota is the secure email service with built-in end-to-end encryption that enables you to communicate securely with anyone on all your devices.
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Steinar H. Gunderson: plocate LWN post
My debian-devel thread about getting plocate in standard didn't turn into anything in Debian, but evidently, it turned into an LWN post!
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APT 2.2 released
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 19th of February 2021 12:16:53 AM Filed under

APT 2.2.0 marks the freeze of the 2.1 development series and the start of the 2.2 stable series.
Let’s have a look at what changed compared to 2.2. Many of you who run Debian testing or unstable, or Ubuntu groovy or hirsute will already have seen most of those changes.
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Louis-Philippe Véronneau: What are the incentive structures of Free Software?
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Wednesday 17th of February 2021 07:01:43 AM Filed under

Theory is nice, but it's even better when you can back it up with data. Sadly, most of the papers on the economic incentives of FOSS are either purely theoretical, or use sample sizes so small they could as well be.
Using the data from the StackOverflow 2018 survey, I thus tried to see if I could somehow confirm my previous assumptions.
With 129 questions and more than 100 000 respondents (which after statistical processing yields between 28 000 and 39 000 observations per variable of interest), the StackOverflow 2018 survey is a very large dataset compared to what economists are used to work with.
Sadly, it wasn't entirely enough to come up with hard answers. There is a strong and significant correlation between writing Free Software and having a higher salary, but endogeneity problems made it hard to give a reliable estimate of how much money this would represent. Same goes for writing code has a hobby: it seems there is a strong and significant correlation, but the exact numbers I came up with cannot really be trusted.
The results on community as an incentive to writing FOSS were the ones that surprised me the most. Although I expected the relation to be quite strong, the coefficients predicted were in fact quite small. I theorise this is partly due to only 8% of the respondents declaring they didn't feel like they belonged in the IT community. With such a high level of adherence, the margin for improvement has to be smaller.
As for altruism, I wasn't able get any meaningful results. In my opinion this is mostly due to the fact there was no explicit survey question on this topic and I tried to make up for it by cobbling data together.
Kinda anti-climatic, isn't it? I would've loved to come up with decisive conclusions on this topic, but if there's one thing I learned while writing this thesis, it is I don't know much after all.
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AmpliPi – A Raspberry Pi-based whole house audio amplifier (Crowdfunding)
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Monday 15th of February 2021 11:36:38 AM Filed under



Micro Nova has put together an open-source, whole house audio amplifier called AmpliPi based on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+. It is capable of streaming four independent sources to 6 stereo output zones, expandable to up to 36 stereo output zones through daisy-chained extender units.
AmpliPi specifically supports inputs from four networking streaming sources including AirPlay, Pandora, Spotify, and DLNA, as well as four analog RCA inputs for your media appliances.
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Debian: Staying Free and New Release by Steinar H. Gunderson
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 15th of February 2021 02:00:16 AM Filed under
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I love Free Software Day 2021: Show your love for Free Software
On this day February 14th, Debian joins the Free Software Foundation Europe in celebration of "I Love Free Software" day. This day takes the time to appreciate and applaud all those who contribute to the many areas of Free Software.
Debian sends all of our love and a giant “Thank you” to the upstream and downstream creators and maintainers, hosting providers, partners, and of course all of the Debian Developers and Contributors.
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I'm not opposed to nonfree firmware in Debian, but I removed it, and my laptop still runs fine
The debate over whether to include nonfree firmware in the Debian installer has emerged from the depths of the debian-devel mailing list under the title “Making Debian available.”
The gist of this extremely long e-mail thread (and Debian is a mailing list culture, despite attempts to pull it into the 21st century is that the Debian Project is hostile to new users because its standard install images do not include nonfree firmware, and installations on most laptops will go poorly because the Linux kernel and free firmware might not support their WiFi or display systems.
Images with nonfree firmware are available, but they are hard to find and aren’t linked on the main Debian web site.
Even a search for nonfree firmware on the Debian web site isn’t much help.A Google search for debian nonfree takes you right where you need to go.
I use the nonfree-firmware Debian images almost all the time. After my attempt at an in-place upgrade from Buster to Bullseye failed a week or so ago, I downloaded a nonfree image and used it to install Bullseye. I restored my user files from a backup (ALWAYS have a backup) and everything is now working.
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Steinar H. Gunderson: plocate 1.1.4 releasedI made a minor release of plocate; as usual, https://plocate.sesse.net/ has the tarballs and such.
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Things Most People Do After Installing Debian
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 14th of February 2021 04:36:51 AM Filed under
Debian is a rock-solid distro of choice for many Linux users, both new and skilled alike. It has a reputation of not breaking very often, and because of that, it’s used as a base for many other Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint Debian Edition, Kali Linux, Devuan, Deepin, Raspberry Pi OS, BunsenLabs Linux, Qubes OS, Tails, SteamOS, and many others.
It’s one of the more mature Linux distros, with its first public release (version 0.01) on 1993-09-15, and its first stable release (version 1.1), named “buzz”, on 1996-06-17.
Many people know the core Debian tools quite well, although often because they are using a Debian derivative such as Ubuntu or Linux Mint (which is in fact an Ubuntu derivative). The popularity of these derived distros is mostly due to their creators’ small amount of effort making fancy-looking desktop themes, and their large marketing budgets. These distros are not much different than Debian itself, and they all have mostly the same free software available to install in their official online package repositories as Debian.
Other notable differences include the decision of which of those packages should be installed by default, and which Debian “update stream” they choose to base themselves off of. Debian has three main update streams, each with their own software repositories, which are known as “Stable”, “Testing”, and “Unstable (a.k.a. Sid)”. Stable is regularly audited by security researcher volunteers and other software experts, and any safety or stability issues found in any of the packages available in this update stream are promptly fixed.
For anyone who doesn’t need that level of safety and stability, it’s usually fine to use the Testing update stream. It can be beneficial in some cases, for example, if you want newer Windows games to work properly with Wine or Proton, sometimes you’ll need the newer Xorg or GPU drivers from the Testing stream for those games to run properly.
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Data Suggests CoC + Outreachy Hasn't Helped Increase Female Participation In Debian
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 14th of February 2021 03:46:26 AM Filed under
An informal case study suggests that since Debian enacted its Code of Conduct and began participating in the Outreachy internship program hasn't helped in increasing female participation within the open-source project but is actually trending lower compared to the early years of this original GNU/Linux distribution.
Daniel Pocock who is a former Debian Developer, O'Reilly author, and Fedora/EPEL packager, carried out a "case study" to see if embracing the Code of Conduct (CoC) and participation in the Outreachy internship program has helped increase female involvement with the Debian GNU/Linux project.
Surprisingly, the data from Pocock points to there actually being less women (including trans) involved in Debian in the more recent years since the Code of Conduct was enacted and Debian's ongoing participation in Outreachy. Pocock looked at the women participation rate (including trans developers) from 2004 through 2013 against that of 2014 through 2020. It was in 2013 that Debian started Outreachy/OPW for the first time and has continued since while their CoC was formalized in 2014.
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[Debian] bullseye froze softly
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Sunday 14th of February 2021 12:39:30 AM Filed under
Dear all, Soft Freeze =========== Following our release calendar, we have frozen bullseye a bit [1]. That means that from now on we expect all uploads to be small, targeted fixes and no new source packages are allowed into bullseye. Source packages must also no longer add or drop binary packages. All packages will have to age at least 10 days in unstable before they are eligible for migration (including those having autopkgtests). Quoting from the policy: """ Starting 2021-02-12, only small, targeted fixes are appropriate for bullseye. We want maintainers to focus on small, targeted fixes. [...] Please note that new transitions, new versions of packages that are part of (build-)essential or large/disruptive changes remain inappropriate. [...] Packages that are not in testing will not be allowed to migrate to testing. This applies to new packages as well as to packages that were removed from testing (either manually or by auto-removals). [...] Dropping or adding binary packages to a source package, moving binaries between source packages or renaming source or binary packages is no longer allowed. Packages with these changes will not be allowed to migrate to testing. These changes are also no longer appropriate in unstable. Please note that packages that are in bullseye at the start of the soft freeze can still be removed if they are buggy. This can happen manually or by the auto-removals. Once packages are removed, they will not be allowed to come back. [...] Don't upload changes to unstable that are not targeted for bullseye. Having changes in unstable that are not targeted/appropriate for bullseye could complicate fixes for your package and related packages (like dependencies and reverse dependencies). """ State of bullseye ================= That said, we currently believe the state of bullseye is pretty good, so we're aiming for a record short freeze However, not all is fine. We're pretty concerned about a couple of known RC bugs which need the proper attention of people familiar with upgrade paths as there's potential to leave upgrading systems unbootable and/or without a working apt. https://bugs.debian.org/953562 / libcrypt https://bugs.debian.org/974552 / libcrypt https://bugs.debian.org/972936 / libgcc-s1 We ask everybody to work on fixing the other RC bugs too. http://deb.li/rcbugs has the list we should drive down to zero together. Please try out upgrading your buster systems to bullseye now and report issue you encounter. General ======= As always, talk to us, preferably via the bts, if you experience issues that we need to be aware of or where you need help. Please be aware it's now a very busy time for us, so bear with us. Our freeze policy is at [1]. On behalf of the release team, Paul [1] https://release.debian.org/bullseye/freeze_policy.html#soft
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Dev boards showcase Rockchip’s new RK3568 and RK3566
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Thursday 11th of February 2021 08:04:16 PM Filed under


Geniatech’s “RK3568 Development Board” runs Android or Linux on Rockchip’s new quad -A55 RK3568, featuring SATA III and M.2 with PCIe 3.0. There is also a similar board based on the slightly lower-spec RK3566.
Rockchip’s premiere system-on-chip launch for 2021 will be the octa-core -A76 and -A55, NPU-equipped Rockchip RK3588, due in Q3, which we covered at the end of the intro to our catalog of 150 Linux hacker boards. Yet, perhaps even more embedded Linux systems will tap two other new quad-core, Cortex-A55 Rockchip SoCs: the RK3568 and slightly stripped down RK3566. First to show its cards is Geniatech, which has posted product pages for a pair of SBCs that tap the new NPU-equipped SoCs.
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