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.

Work on ubuimg / debimg for Ubuntu started

The work on the Ubuntu version of debimg has begun. The majority of changes will be the following ones (in the order they will be done):

1. Change debimg to use germinate to calculate dependencies (package lists)
2. Add the additional stuff (live, etc.)

Once we can recreate the Ubuntu hardy i386 and amd64 alternate disks, work starts on the live filesystem and on merging these features back into debimg master, which will also get support for more archs.

debimg uses germinate directly on the Python level.

debimg 0.0.3ubuntu1 is sheduled for this Sunday. This will be more or less really hacks.

• [master] Move the fetching of packages from packages to media, so we can use it for all files
• Add libdebimg.germinate as a wrapper around germinate, providing functions to build the disks
• Modify libdebimg to build all disks in one run, multiple architectures and multiple seeds.

The basic code structure will look like the following:

1. For each architecture:
   1. seeds = Run germinate
   2. For seed in seeds:
      1. Get the packages
      2. Get extra files
      3. Build the disk

The Debian version may switch to seed files too, in version 0.2.

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.

Ubuntu stuff: gnash 0.8.2 for gutsy, ndisgtk, aufs

A backport of gnash 0.8.2 is available in my PPA at

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/juliank/ubuntu gutsy main

I wanted to try it, but I had no time to compile it, so I uploaded it to the PPA. The next day, I had a compiled backport.

I don’t use it actively because it does not support some sites I visit.

Another news is the recent addition of ndisgtk to the ship and ship-live seeds, which means it will be available on the disk. http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/ubuntu-seeds/ubuntu.hardy/revision/1223.

BTW, recent Ubuntu Hardy images (including Alpha 6) have support for using aufs instead of unionfs, simply add union=aufs to the kernel options. It may help if you have problems with unionfs and should be faster and more stable.

pristine-deb - git-buildpackage’s pristine-tar support

Reading about the idea of pristine-deb, I actually noticed that using ar -rc file.deb debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz does not work, due to timestamps and other differences.

I am currently working on a pristine-deb program which will workaround all these issues. It will be able to work with git repositories like pristine-tar and uses pristine-tar for control.tar.gz and data.tar.gz. I may also add a function to decompress all compressed files (like changelog.gz) and uses pristine-gz to compress this file again before adding it to the tarball. This may save some additional space.

BTW, git-buildpackage now supports pristine-tar. Simply enable it with “pristine-tar = True” in gbp.conf. Thank you Guido Guenther, for adding these patches.

Ubuntu: aufs with casper 1.118 / ndisgtk 0.8.1 / ndisgtk in main?

Colin Watson today uploaded casper 1.118, now supporting aufs. To use aufs in future Ubuntu disks built with casper 1.118 or newer, use union=aufs. Please test it.

Another upload today was ndisgtk 0.8.1-1ubuntu1, bringing Ubuntu up-to-date with Debian and closing 3 bugs.

BTW, I requested to include ndisgtk in main, see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MainInclusionReportNdisgtk. Having ndisgtk on the Ubuntu disks would be very useful for users without linux network drivers available and without enough experiences to use ndiswrapper from the commandline.

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.

uploads and machine-readable copyright

Two days ago, zobel uploaded some of my package updates for me.

One of them was ndisgtk 0.8.1, which adds more translations and fixes some problems. I intent to create a 0.9 release soon, with support for PolicyKit. I will upload the release candidate of this version to Debian experimental and Ubuntu Hardy.

The other upload was readahead-list 1:1.20060421.1016-1, which I found on the Gentoo mirrors, but not where previous releases were located. This is OK, because the upstream author is a Gentoo developer and uploaded this tarball himself. I already requested to sync this release into Ubuntu Hardy, to reduce the diff between both distributions.

In both uploads, I changed the format of debian/copyright to match http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/CopyrightFormat. I will also change my other packages in their next uploads, and hope that other maintainers also use the new format, especially for NEW packages. I some cases (especially when you are upstream + packager), this format is also shorter.