Archive for the ‘Debian’ Category.
8th April 2005, 08:11 am
Yesterday, at the exercise class for the course on Security and Fault-tolerance in Distributed Systems, Christian Cachin booted his laptop to show us some graphs explaining how the sophistication of onlin attacks have gone up, while the level of knowledge necessary to execute these attacks have dropped.
His laptop was running Debian and I noticed that the image of the Debian Swirl in his version of GDM has a little white border around it. And this is exciting for me because I made that border! :-) Or at least I filled wishlist bug #201303 against the gdm package, which the maintainer then accepted.
It’s very cool to see something like this — even though it’s a purely cosmetic thing.
31st March 2005, 08:20 pm
I’m have finally brought my computer back online again — so now the title of this
website is true once again :-) The first thing to do was to update my Debian
installation with about 400 MiB of updates. I’m tracking the soon-to-be-stable
“testing” distribution of Debian, which means that I receive bug fixes pretty
quickly after they are found and committed to the “unstable” distribution. But
it also means that a lot of updates pile up when my computer isn’t online.
I’m online through a Netopia ADSL router, which we could buy from Bluewin
for 200 CHF. That included the PCMCIA card for Stéphanie’s computer as well,
so I think the price is reasonable. The only minus is the fact that there doesn’t
seem to be any way of making the card run under Debian — I’ve searched a lot
and tried all the tricks I know but nothing worked. So I guess Stéphanie will
be limited to Windows for now.
22nd February 2005, 12:22 pm
I’m visiting my family in Aalborg for a couple of days — when I go to Switzerland next
month they wont be just an hours drive away anymore :-)
The plan for this week is to package the stuff in my room and move it up here to my
parents. I’ll bring some of it with me to Switzerland, but only the most important stuff.
Of course that includes my computer!
Speaking of my computer… I’ve ordered two Seagate 7200.7 SATA NCQ disks
each with 120 GB. The plan is to combine them into a RAID 1 mirror so that I will have a
reliable place for my photos and other data. In Skejbygård I could just copy my data to
my friend Svend’s computer, but that wont work anymore when I’m in Switzerland. And
besides: I’ve wanted a RAID system for quite some time now — I believe that the
Debian installer can install on a RAID 1 system now.
15th March 2004, 12:26 pm
Sorry about the lack of news lately… I’ve had my mind on so many other
things. The most important thing in my life now is Stéphanie — my
girlfriend. We’ve just spend two wonderful days in Aalborg with my
mom and dad and in general we just try to spend as much time
together as possible!
I’m having holidays right now — no less than two weeks off! This is
because of the new quarter system they’ve made for the natural sciences
department where we’re going to have a break in the middle of the semester
for our quarter exams. But I’m still having the good old semester courses,
so I don’t have any exams now, and hence I have two weeks with nothing to
do except enjoying myself!
[][Debian]
Right now I’m about to install [Debian][] on Stéphanies laptop — she’s
already using SuSE but, frankly, I cannot figure out how their
package system works… it looks very similar to the RPM-thing RedHat
uses, with the same dependency problems. That’s what I like most about
Debian: you don’t have to dig around on the web to find the right packages
to satisfy the dependencies, for all the packages that depend on each other
are usually right there next to each other on the same server and so APT
can figure it out automagically. I know that there’s similar things for
RPM packages, but I don’t want to use a lot of time to figure it out, I
want something I’m familiar with.
That’s it for now — see you all later!
20th July 2002, 10:25 am
I just saw this huge discussion over at the Debian-devel
mailinglist
about whether or not the LPPL (LaTeX Project Public License) is a
free license. That is free in the Debian sense:
it has be fulfill the
DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines) before it can be
included in the main
section of the Debian
archives. There’s currently lots of stuff in the archive that’s licensed
under the LPPL, but the
Debian guys would rather see that it was
distributed under another license, or that the
LPPL is changed to conform with
the DFSG.
The problem seams to be, that the
LPPL forbids you from modifying a
file and then redistributing it using the same filename. This is
important for us LaTeX folks, because one
of the promises of LaTeX (and TeX) is,
that a document processed today will look identical when it’s processed 10
years from now. If everybody is allowed to change important files, then
that promise would be hard to keep. This isn’t just a theoretical concern
— it has happened that someone changed the Computer Modern fonts made by
Donald E. Knuth and
distributed them as the original set. They thought that they were helping
people by improving the fonts, but that wasn’t how others looked at it. I
don’t know exactly what the problem was, but if they had changed the width
of a character just a little, then it could mean that lines would be broken
differently, something that must not happen. If an author has prepared a
document using his own installation of
LaTeX, then he has to be absolutely sure
that the publishers version of LaTeX will
place the letters at the exact same position on the page.
One the other hand, then the Debian guys want to
reserver the right to change the files in their
LaTeX distribution, in case they discover
a security risk or something like that. This is a very hypothetical
situation, but they want the right to do this anyway.
So, is boils down to a question of trust: do the
LaTeX community trust the users not to
cause havoc by distributing modified files from the core of TeX and
LaTeX? Apparently not, and after the
story about the improved CM fonts, I can understand their fear. I don’t
think they fear that the teTeX
maintainers would go crazy,
it’s more about the principle that people has the option of changing
those files.
I hope that they can works things out — it would be a real shame if this
“battle of principles” should end with moving the teTeX packages to
non-free
, as almost everybody recognizes that TeX and
LaTeX are some of the finest examples of
free software.