Debian
It Soon May Be Easier Building Debian Packages On Fedora
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 20th of February 2019 08:33:43 PM Filed under

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It Soon May Be Easier Building Debian Packages On Fedora
While Fedora is deeply rooted around RPMs, the necessary components for building Debian binary packages may soon end up in the Fedora repository -- they're currently undergoing the package review process. Developer Dridi Boukelmoune was fed up with the current situation and took to improving the Debian packaging options for Fedora to make it easier spinning Debian packages there without resorting to VMs or other avenues. This can be useful in cases of commercial/internal software and other practices where you may be needing to build both RPMs and Debs and desire to do so from a single stack.
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Ditch RPM in favor of DPKG
I know how important RPM is to the Fedora Project, but it breaks everything downstream and we'd be better off using DPKG as we should have from day one. I'm calling this initiative fedpkg: Fedora Embraces DPKG. A bit of background here: I build both RPMs and DEBs for $DAYJOB and until recently my workflow was quite painful because I needed extra steps between git checkout and git push that involves a VM, because what we ship as apt is in reality apt-rpm. It finally got enough on my nerves to locally build the things I needed and after a month I have already amortized my efforts with the time I save not having to deal with needless extra hoops. In order to successfully build debs on Fedora I needed 4 packages that I'm now submitting for review: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=gnu-config https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=strip-nondeterminism https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=sbuild https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=apt I need more than reviews here. Three of those packages are heavy on Perl code, and I'm not a Perl Monk. I tried to CC perl-sig as per the guidelines [1] (also tried with the mailing list address) but bugzilla replied kindly: CC: perl-sig did not match anything Apt is a mix of C, Perl and C++ code, so I would be reassured if I could have a C++ co-maintainer too. I'm only a C developer so if something goes wrong outside of the C realm that would be helpful. Two of those packages should be runtime dependencies of debhelper. The current apt package should be renamed to apt-rpm, I will look up the procedure for that to happen. I understand that when someone sees they should run "apt-get install foo" somewhere on the web it's helpful for non-savvy users that this JustWorks(tm) [2], but apt-rpm is dead upstream and it shouldn't be advertised as apt. I hope I CC'd everyone that should get this heads up, and hope to find help for the reviews and co-maintainership. The packaging does nothing fancy, there are quirks here and there but overall it was rather easy to put together. And of course I would be happy to help with reviews too in exchange. And thanks again to the mock developers, its design is so much better than either sbuild or pdebuild that I barely have pain points left when it comes to RPM packaging. Thanks, Dridi
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Debian: INN 2.6.3, Netplan and LTS Work
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 19th of February 2019 02:36:41 AM Filed under
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INN 2.6.3
INN 2.6.3 has been released. This is a bug fix and minor feature release over INN 2.6.2, and the upgrade should be painless. The main ISC downloads page will be updated shortly; in the meantime, you can download the new release from ftp.isc.org or my personal INN pages. The latter also has links to the full changelog and the other INN documentation.
The big change in this release is support for Python 3. Embedded Python filtering and authentication hooks for innd and nnrpd can now use version 3.3.0 or later of the Python interpreter. Python 2.x is still supported (2.3.0 or later).
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Netplan support in FAI
The new version FAI 5.8.1 now generates the configuration file for Ubuntu's netplan tool. It's a YAML description for setting up the network devices, replacing the /etc/network/interfaces file. The FAI CD/USB installation image for Ubuntu now offers two different variants to be installed, Ubuntu desktop and Ubuntu server without a desktop environment. Both are using Ubuntu 18.04 aka Bionic Beaver.
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Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, January 2019
Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.
Slax 9.8 Linux Distro Released with Various Updates from Debian GNU/Linux 9.8
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Monday 18th of February 2019 02:30:39 PM Filed under

Slax 9.8 is now available for download and comes about three weeks after the release of Slax 9.7, which improved compatibility with new USB devices and made the ISO image even smaller by using 1MB blocks to compress the SquashFS filesystem.
Slax 9.8 is based on the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 9.8 operating system and incorporates all of the upstream security updates and miscellaneous bug fixes that were included in the Debian GNU/Linux 9.8 "Stretch" point release.
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Debian: Sway in Experimental and More
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 18th of February 2019 02:31:02 AM Filed under
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Sway in experimental
A couple of days ago the 1.0-RC2 version of Sway, a Wayland compositor, landed in Debian experimental. Sway is a drop in replacement for the i3 tiling window manager for wayland. Drop in replacement means that, apart from minor adaptions, you can reuse your existing i3 configuration file for Sway. On the Website of sway you can find a short introduction video that shows the most basic concepts of using Sway, though if you have worked with i3 you will feel at home soon.
In the video the utility swaygrab is mentioned, but this tool is not part of Sway anymore. There is another screenshot tool now though, called grim which you can combine with the tool slurp if you want to select regions for screenshots. The video also mentions swaylock, which is a screen locking utility similar to i3lock. It was split out of the main Sway release a couple of weeks ago but there also exists a Debian package by now. And there is a package for swayidle, which is a idle management daemon, which comes handy for locking the screen or for turning of your display after a timeout. If you need clipboard manager, you can use wl-clipboard. There is also a notification daemon called mako (the Debian package is called mako-notifier and is in NEW) and if you don’t like the default swaybar, you can have a look at waybar (not yet in Debian, see this RFS). If you want to get in touch with other Sway users there is a #sway IRC channel on freenode. For some tricks setting up Sway you can browse the wiki.
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The Sway Wayland Compositor Is Now Available From Debian Experimental
For those that have been wanting to try out the near-final Sway 1.0, this Wayland compositor has made its way into the Debian archive albeit only in the "experimental" section for now.
At the end of January was the start of the upstream Debian packaging work around Sway and it's kept up with the latest release candidates. Available from Debian Experimental is now the latest Sway 1.0-RC2.
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Making debug symbols discoverable and fetchable
Michael wrote a few days ago about the experience of debugging programs on Debian. And he is certainly not the only one, who found it more difficult to find debug symbols on Linux systems in general.
But fortunately, it is a fixable problem. Basically, we just need a service to map a build-id to a downloadable file containing that build-id. You can find the source code to my (prototype) of such a dbgsym service on salsa.debian.org.
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Debian Developers' Updates and Python Bits
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 17th of February 2019 03:07:35 AM Filed under

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Steve Kemp: Updated myy compiler, and bought a watch.
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David Moreno: Dell XPS 13 9380
Got myself a XPS 13” 9380 that Dell just released as “Developer Edition” with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS pre-installed. They just released it on January 2019.
Ubuntu didn’t last long though. I prefer OS X Mojave than any of the Ubuntu installations. It’s okay though, it’s just not for me.
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Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, January 2019
I was assigned 20 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 5 hours from December. I worked 24 hours and so will carry over 1 hour.
I prepared another stable update for Linux 3.16 (3.16.63), but did not upload a new release yet.
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Detect the player’s boundary
In this article, we will start to create the boundary detection mechanism which can be used to help the boy moving around the canvas. We will go slowly where this topic will take a few chapters to complete. In this chapter, we will focus on below issues.
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Threadless mode in Mitogen 0.3
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Getting Started with Pathlib
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Updated Debian 9: 9.8 released
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Saturday 16th of February 2019 07:20:27 PM Filed under
The Debian project is pleased to announce the eighth update of its stable distribution Debian 9 (codename "stretch"). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.
Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 9 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old "stretch" media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror.
Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages, and most such updates are included in the point release.
Ubuntu-Centric Full Circle Magazine and Debian on the Raspberryscape
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 16th of February 2019 08:34:21 AM Filed under

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Full Circle Magazine: Full Circle Weekly News #121
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Debian on the Raspberryscape: Great news!
I already mentioned here having adopted and updated the Raspberry Pi 3 Debian Buster Unofficial Preview image generation project. As you might know, the hardware differences between the three families are quite deep ? The original Raspberry Pi (models A and
, as well as the Zero and Zero W, are ARMv6 (which, in Debian-speak, belong to the armel architecture, a.k.a. EABI / Embedded ABI). Raspberry Pi 2 is an ARMv7 (so, we call it armhf or ARM hard-float, as it does support floating point instructions). Finally, the Raspberry Pi 3 is an ARMv8-A (in Debian it corresponds to the ARM64 architecture).
[...]
As for the little guy, the Zero that sits atop them, I only have to upload a new version of raspberry3-firmware built also for armel. I will add to it the needed devicetree files. I have to check with the release-team members if it would be possible to rename the package to simply raspberry-firmware (as it's no longer v3-specific).
Why is this relevant? Well, the Raspberry Pi is by far the most popular ARM machine ever. It is a board people love playing with. It is the base for many, many, many projects. And now, finally, it can run with straight Debian! And, of course, if you don't trust me providing clean images, you can prepare them by yourself, trusting the same distribution you have come to trust and love over the years.
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Debian: Mint Debian Edition Cindy, Reproducible Builds and Markus Koschany's Free Software Activities in January 2019
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 13th of February 2019 11:18:20 AM Filed under
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A Look at Linux Mint Debian Edition Cindy
Let check out the latest Debian based Linux Mint
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Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #198
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Markus Koschany: My Free Software Activities in January 2019
Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you’re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.
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antiX MX 18.1 Distro Released with Latest Debian GNU/Linux 9.7 "Stretch" Updates
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Monday 11th of February 2019 10:19:04 PM Filed under
Based on Debian GNU/Linux 9.7 "Stretch," antiX MX 18.1 updates the mx-installer, which is based on gazelle-installer, to address bug that lead to crashes during installation of the GRUB bootloader, adds support in mx-repo-manager to lists even more repository mirrors, and improves MX-PackageInstaller and MX-Conky.
Another important area improved in antiX MX 18.1 is the antiX live-USB image, which now features persistence up to 20GB of disk space, as well as much better UEFI boot capabilities, especially when running it on 64-bit UEFI systems. The devs consider creating a "full-featured" antiX live-USB for 32-bit UEFI systems as well.
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An Everyday Linux User Review Of Debian 9
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 11th of February 2019 06:26:22 AM Filed under

Over the past few months I have been working my way through the top Linux distributions and writing a review for each one.
Thus far I have covered Manjaro, Linux Mint, Elementary, MX Linux and Ubuntu. These reviews are based on the top 5 distributions as listed at Distrowatch. Number 6 on that list is Debian which is the distribution I am reviewing here.
The list of distributions at Distrowatch include every distribution that you may or may or not have heard of and it is worth pointing out that not every distribution on the list is suitable for everybody’s needs. For example Kali is very popular with penetration testers and security experts because it comes with a whole range of tools for testing networks and for searching for vulnerabilities. Kali however is not suitable for the average Joe who primarily uses their system for web browsing and casual gaming.
The Everyday Linux User blog is about looking at Linux distributions from the point of view of an average computer user. What this means is that it isn’t specifically for developers, for hackers, for artists, musicians or video bloggers. The reviews are aimed at showing off a standard desktop operating system that by and large should be easy to install, easy to use and should either provide a good variety of applications or the ability to easily install those applications.
With this in mind whilst reviewing certain distributions I will state where that distribution is or isn’t necessarily suitable for the Everyday Linux User.
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