Responding to e-mails with Evolution

Every time I receive an email at my ubuntu.com address, and respond to it, Evolution uses my jak@jak-linux.org e-mail address.

It should be noted that the e-mails are fetched with a single account, as they are on an imap server, and because ubuntu.com is a forward address.

Is there any way to make Evolution respond with the e-mail address at which I received an email?

BTW, work on debimg 0.0.4ubuntu1 (previously 0.0.3ubuntu1) has reached the first milestone: Support for selecting packages based on the output of Germanite. This weekend, I will release debimg 0.0.4 and debimg 0.0.4ubuntu1 (or I merge it directly, let’s see).

Update: This was just some mistake on my side. I get emails from an Ubuntu mailing list and want to send emails to it using the ubuntu.com address. It works for normal emails.

April Updates

This is a summary of most of my activities since end of march. BTW, I’m still at the T&S step in NM since January (I completed P&P in about 3 days). Also, thank you Tolimar for being the second DD signing my key!

GNOME 2.22 (Python) / Updated Packages

At the end of march, I updated some GNOME packages. These packages were gnome-python and gnome-python-desktop. The upload of gnome-python-desktop was really important, because the old version depended on libtotem-plparser7, which was not available anymore, and FTBFS because the metacity API changed. This upload made other packages building and running again!

That time, I also uploaded new releases of dir2ogg and ndisgtk, which fixed some bugs.

On the first of April, I updated aufs to a new upstream snapshot, which fixed linux-modules-extra-2.6’s FTBFS on armel, removed bashism in shell scripts, added a hack for limited splice support, and enabled building on -rt kernel (if the required functions are exported).

Packages To-Do

In the next week, I will upload a new aufs snapshot with support for kernel 2.6.25 and re-added support for kernels < 2.6.23. I will also update app-install-data to the current state of the archive.

Other stuff includes my ITA upload of gimmie and the upload of jockey, a tool to install drivers. Jockey will also be modified to provide the functionality from ndisgtk, which development has been discontinued as it is feature-complete (bug fixes will still be provided). Another package will be, of course, debimg 0.1 once it’s released and of course the python-libisofs bindings.

Ubuntu packages

I requested syncs for dir2ogg and ndisgtk (after I uploaded sync’able versions to Debian) and for aria2, which was not installable before. I have also reported some bugs and used 8.04 for some time.

debimg stuff

I released debimg 0.0.3 on 4th April. This is the first release to require Python 2.5 and also the first release which uses the new media module, which provides a generic interface to disk creation.

I actually have not worked on debimg since that day, mainly because I did not have enough time. In May, I hope to add support for more architectures (at least theoretically, by providing a generic way of handling bootloaders and other non-packages and non-dists files) and release 0.1.

debimg 0.1 will not contain any features related to python-libisofs, because the focus is getting the basic functionality.

I have also not uploaded any new netinst build on jak-linux.org, since March.

debimg and the Debian Project News

Debimg will appear in the second issue of the Debian Project News, I’m currently working on the text for it. (BTW, I have also fixed one link in the first issue of the DPN)

debimg and Ubuntu

I have suggested to switch Ubuntu’s image building to debimg, and offered to do everything needed to do this. Given the speed of debimg and that the current features almost match the requirements of Ubuntu, this seems to be a great idea.

python-libisofs

As you may know, I released a first preview of the python-libisofs bindings some days ago, with almost complete support for creating image files. The next steps will be reading and growing images and of course, the bindings for libburn and libisoburn.

Switching from Ubuntu 8.04 to Debian unstable

I am currently working on migrating my laptop from Ubuntu 8.04 to Debian unstable, in order to be able to work better on my packages. Since most of my packages are sync’able now, this enables more efficient development. Another reason is to help the lenny release. This does not mean that I will be less active on the Ubuntu side, at least not much.

Let’s make Debian Lenny and Ubuntu Intrepid the best releases ever.

Fedora 9 & Kernel Mode Setting

Today, I decided to try out the new kernel mode setting feature in Fedora 9, which moves some stuff about video from userspace into the kernel.

I tested this on my notebook, a HP Compaq 6720s with Intel X3100 (GM965) graphics controller.

I downloaded the preview live image for x86_64 and booted with the i915.modeset=1 option. The boot was almost normal, except that it was flicker-free. After the system booted I switched the virtual terminal from Xorg to tty1 and back, and it was extremely fast. The terminals all had the same resolution.

This does not mean that everything is perfect. There are a lot of things which do not work. For example, running glxgears and moving the window does not “look good”. Also, speed was a bit low. Normally, in Ubuntu Hardy, I get about 1000 FPS, in Fedora I only got 230 FPS. But the difference was not visible.

Another thing which did not work was suspend & resume, because the graphics card seemed to be not correctly re-initialized. This is worse than Ubuntu & Debian. In Ubuntu, suspend & resume works almost every time. In Debian, it works except that the backlight is disabled in X.

If these problems can be fixed, it would be very interesting to get this feature into Ubuntu Intrepid, maybe not as the default, but as an option for people who want to test it.

Fedora 9 seems to be a fast and stable distribution, with experimental features for experienced users and developers. It also provides a nice application for configuring PulseAudio, like per-application volume settings, a functionality I miss in Ubuntu.

python-libisofs 0.0.1 available

A first preview of the python-libisofs bindings is available now. It’s currently located in a git branch at git.debian.org, but this may change at a later point.

The bindings support the creation of ISO Images and (almost) all options libisofs supports, like Rockridge, Joliet, and much more. Reading and Modifying existing images is not supported yet.

The code is written in Cython and you need cython installed for building from the git branch. It can be installed just like any other Python module/extension/package, using a setup.py.

Browse: http://git.debian.org/?p=users/jak-guest/python-libisofs.git
Get: git clone git://git.debian.org/git/users/jak-guest/python-libisofs.git

I’ll package it for Debian within the next weeks after some further tests.

Asia: Phoenix available in Europe

After the reunion of the original Asia lineup in 2006, a tour and the live cd/dvd “Fantasia - Live in Tokyo” in 2007, the super group returns with the first new studio album in 25 years.

For those of you who don’t know about them, Asia is a band formed in 1981, including former members of Yes, King Crimson, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Uriah Heep, U.K., and The Buggles.

The most popular song of Asia is “Heat of the Moment”, from their debut album which spent 9 weeks at number 1 U.S. album chart.

This new album is excellent, featuring songs like the rocker “Never Again” and “Extraordinary Life”. A must-have for all Asia fans out there.

The new album will be released in the United States on April, 15 and in Japan on April, 23. It can be bought from Amazon.com for $9.99 and in Germany from Amazon.de for 15.97€. (See your own Amazon for your local price.)

BTW, the Album is already #20 in Amazon.com Music Bestsellers.

Visit the band’s Website, and buy your own one from your favorite shop.

JAK LINUX website now powered by ikiwiki

I’m glad to announce that finally, after being powered by ftpsync for more than six months, the JAK LINUX website now uses ikiwiki.

I currently have some small issues with the website: After using –rebuild, tarballs have a different modification time and are therefore reuploaded everytime, though the content is actually the same. I would also need a plugin to create directory indexes with sha1sums, but I haven’t found one yet. (If you know one, please let me know).

If you have never heard of ikiwiki: ikiwiki is a wiki system used and developed by Debian Developer Joey Hess and many contributors. In contrast to ftpsync, a python script I wrote in 2007, it has an active upstream with multiple contributors, and supports multiple markup languages (e.g. Markdown).

This switch to ikiwiki is also a switch back to the design used at mentors.debian.net, which had been replaced in December 2007 with a (CC-licensed) design created by styleshout.com. This template just looks better and has the better license (GPL-2).

In the next days, I will cleanup and extend the website and the template and release both under the terms of the GNU GPL version 2. I will alsoI will also try to write a plugin for directory indexes, write a plugin to create directory indexes (although I have almost no experience with perl), and will release it under the GPL 2.

Thank you, Joey and all contributors for creating this software.

Experiences with git and pristine-tar

In the last days, I used git very often. It was almost the first time I really used it, but I quickly understand the basic commands.

As some of you may know, the readahead-list package is now maintained in a git repo in the collab-maint project. I decided to use git instead of bzr (which I used for everything before), because of its speed and because I wanted to learn more about git, how it works.

I used git-import-dsc to import the first revision, and used debdiffs from 1 to 2 and from 2 to 3 to import the next revisions. Afterwards, I run git-import-orig on the new upstream tarball, which I downloaded and recompressed. Then, I did the packaging changes, added them using ‘git add changed-file‘ and committed them using git commit.

After I had done this, I read Planet Debian and saw Joey Hess’s post about the new features of pristine-tar 0.5, i.e. the integration with git. Running Ubuntu at the moment, I fetched the source package, built it and installed it.

I then opened a shell in my git repo and ran pristine-tar commit path-to-orig upstream/0.20050517.0220 to import the delta for the first tarball. Afterwards I did it for the second tarball.

Because I use git-buildpackage to build the package and Joey said he would like to see support for pristine-tar in git-buildpackage, I then wrote a patch for the programs in git-buildpackage to import and export the orig.tar.gz when needed. The patch can be seen in gitweb, and the maintainer responded in Bug#463580 will integrate the patch with some minor modifications.

Both git and pristine-tar are great works, and it makes it so easy to maintain the readahead-list package. The combination of git, git-buildpackage and pristine-tar is the most powerful I ever used to maintain a Debian package, especially when you are not upstream.

A small benchmark: Bazaar, Git, Mercurial

I just performed some benchmark on Bazaar, Git and Mercurial. This is a very small benchmark, I may publish a more detailed one in a few weeks.

vcs-performance.pdf

Some notes:

1. The unit in the first chart is seconds
2. I haven’t run git-gc before taking the directory sizes. Running git-gc saves about 1083 kilobytes
3. This PDF file is licensed under the MIT License, see http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

Bye, 2007 - Welcome 2008!

April 2007, I joined the Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe.

I also became involved in the development of Debian GNU/Linux with my first package, aufs, sponsored by Daniel Baumann. This was the starting point for my Debian stuff.

Now I maintain 6 packages in Debian. One of the most interesting packages is gnome-app-install, which will be part of the gnome-desktop task (already added to tasksel’s list). Users will be able to install applications easily. It also activates the automatic codec installation, so users will be able to play most multimedia files easily.

30th December, I finally got assigned my AM, Martin Zobel-Helas (zobel), and I’m happy to be able to continue the NM process now.

On the Ubuntu side, some things have happened, too. I merged several new versions of dir2ogg and a new aufs version, and became an Ubuntu Member on the 29th November.

In 2008, I plan to complete the New Maintainer process and become an Ubuntu MOTU. I will continue my packaging stuff, and will merge new features from Debian to Ubuntu and from Ubuntu to Debian.

A happy new year to everyone and sorry for blogging this such late.

Welcome to my new Blog!

Dear readers,

I used to blog on fsfe.org, the website of the Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe. There was one problem that made me switch to wordpress.com: only Fellows can post comments.

I will write here about my activity in free software projects, like Debian and Ubuntu, and my own software.

I am still working on the categories and will maybe change the style.