La Salle Debain

Today my daughter (now 27 months old) turned to my wife, pointed to my laptop and said "Jyo mummy, Debian chhe." ("Look Mummy it's Debian.") Is being potty-trained a prerequisite for the new maintainer process?

Today (well, yesterday by now) I attended a meeting on Debians' behalf of several New York-area free software groups. The meetings agenda was to try and begin to organize a replacement for Linuxworld which as of next year is moving to Boston. Committees were formed to work on various tasks. Yours truly is doing the vital task of name/logo/mission statement brainstorming. More news as it happens.

While packaging the latest webmin version I had an interesting time trying to figure out how to do stuff to files with names like config-*-linux. The trouble is '*' gets interpreted as a wildcard character. Normally in bash on the commandline to get a literal '*' you would just do this: config-\*-linux. But in a makefile, it gets converted to config-\\*-linux. Increasing the number of slashes was suggested but to no avail. The correct answer is $$'config-*-linux' (You have to use two dollar signs so it doesn't get interpreted as a make variable.)

Februarys' Linux Journal has an article by Doc Searls (the man of bronze?) called "DIY-IT: How Linux And Open Source Are Bringing Do-It-Yourself to Information Technology" which includes the following quote:

"I'm seeing far more Debian than any report gives it credit for",
says one technologist working for a large vendor that has partnerships
with Red Hat and SuSE. "Red Hat and SuSE may sell more, so they show
up on surveys that follow sales. But in terms of implementation, Debian
is pretty big."

So all you stealth Debian users, stand up and be counted!

Sponsored another upload for Millis Miller. Here are the changes since
the last upload.

* Fixed the daemon to go into background
* Place files in /usr/lib/cgi-bin directory (not /var/www)
* Change depend to be on virtual package 'httpd'
* Add /etc/iptotal.cfg to conffiles
* Correct path specifiers in *.cgi and iptotal.cfg files
* Correctly create subdirectories archive/ and images/
* Correct homepage link
* Separate cgi and html files
* Fixed a missing depend for shared libs (${shlibs:Depends})

Here's my report on this years Linuxworld Conference and Expo where Debian once again had a booth in the .org pavilion.

Some of you may already know my theory on how the location of the .org pavilion indicates the health of the Linux business world. For those who don't, here's an explanation. In the glory days of yore when Red Hat and VA Linux had mega-IPOs, Mozilla was open sourced, and the penguin hordes were about to reduce Redmond to a charred and smoking ruin, the .org pavilion was relegated to the very back of the show floor. As times became more dire, it started creeping up until the fell winter of 2003 when it was actually in the front where ordinary people could see it. This year it was in the middle and to the left side so I predict a good year for the Linux industry. The booth was your basic 10' x 10' at the end of a row with a table, two chairs and a waste paper basket. We had one ethernet feed so had t bring in a hub. There was supposed to be WiFi access but hardly anyone ever got it working.

Debian developers manning the booth this year for one or more days were Clint Adams, Phil Blundell, Adam DiCarlo, Jimmy Kaplowitz, Joe Nahmias, Matt Taggart, and myself. We were also visited by Andres Saloman, Laurence Lane, and Bruce Perens who wanted to get his key signed so he can get back into Debian development with his User Linux initiative. Here is a picture from NewsForge of Adam and Jimmy in our booth. [Debian booth]

We decided we were going to do some proper PR this year but had some mixed results some of which were due to totally underestimating the response we thought we would get. I was going to produce posters and flyers. The first printer I approached to make the posters botched the job so at the last minute I had to have one made at Kinkos. They charged a hideous amount of money so I only had one made. The flyers were good but I didn't make enough and they were gone by Thursday morning. Kinkos struck again with the banner Jimmy was going to have made. It never showed up. Luckily we didn't pay for it either because once again they charged way too much. Matt and Adams' efforts were more fruitful. Matt brought swirl t-shirts, this year in powder blue with "debian/rules" on the back. (We also had a box of beige shirts with Tux on the front courtesy of TinyApps.org.) and Debian stickers and case badges. They were a huge hit as always. Adam did a phenomenal job in procuring CD donations. They also flew out of our hands in breathtaking quantities. One slight miscalculation was I asked him to get lots of Sarge netinst CDs with beta 2 of the new installer. My reasoning was that the perennial complaint is that "Debian is too hard to install." so people would be really interested in trying our new installer. But it turned out it was 7-cd sets of Woody which people were really interested in which surprised us all. All these efforts netted us as a total of over $2,000 for the project, a substantial increase over last year.

Once again Sun lent us a computer and once again we had trouble getting Debian installed on it. (Though for a different reason than last time.) We gave up and showed Debian on our laptops. Phil had an IPaq too which looked really cool. Over in the KDE booth they were demoing KDE on Debian machines and our favorite distro was to be found scattered throughout other booths too.

Last year the big event which drew people to us from other distros was Mandrakes' bankruptcy. This year it was Red Hats' refocus of their distribution. Now I understand their reasons (and I'm not just saying that because of the gift of a cardigan I got for attending a presentation for RHCEs) but it has a lot of their customers and supporters worried and Debian is looking like a tempting option for such people. Over all, I was impressed by the more sophisticated knowledge of the various distributions people were showing. Well I did get one person asking me "what is a Linux distribution?" but that was only one. Debian seems to have much better name recognition these days. Even novices want to use Debian. I felt I had to caution them, "Are you sure? Debian is not the most newbie-friendly distribution." but no they wanted Debian. A lot of this publicity is due to commercial distributions like Lindows], Knoppix, and Xandros as wells as Live CDs like Morphix and [http://www.morphix.org which are based on Debian.

On Friday, I was interviewed by SYS-CON radio and may also do an article about Debian for Linuxworld magazine which they publish. The interview went pretty well. I didn't mumble or ramble on too much. I forgot most of the DFSG and social contract which is a little embarrassing but did manage to mention the more salient bits.

Next year the show is leaving New York for Boston so this may be my last as an Exhibitor but I had a good time and met many interesting people. Getting thankyous from satisfied Debian users really makes all the work worthwhile.

I would like to personally thank all the developers and volunteers who manned the booth, About Debian, BSide Internet Media, Linux Central Computer Depot], the crepe lady, DebianVendor.org, Innovation Software Group linux-cd.com, [http://linuxcentral.com, the Pakistani taxi driver with who I had an interesting chat about the similarities between Islam and Hinduism even though we missed the Javits center in the process, Red Hat (haha), The Sphere, Sun, SYS-CON Media, tinyapps.org, and any other helpful person or company who I may have inadvertently failed to mention due my lousy memory.

• Added restricted architecture field to control file to prevent buildds from screwing up. (Closes: #228457)
• webmin-bind: Only suggest bind as this package doesn't necessarily require it to be installed locally. (Closes: #223922)

• webmin-samba: depends on webmin-inetd or webmin-xinetd (Closes: #226802)
• webmin-ldap-useradmin: Added missing dependencies on webmin-core (Closes: #225478]) and libnss-ldap (Closes: [http://bugs.debian.org/225478)
• webmin-quota: Made sure package is properly configured for Debian. Thanks Bozhan Boiadzhiev even though I didn't directly use his suggestion. (Closes: #228069)

Just a quick update to the Brazilian and Japanese debconf translations.

The second beta of the next generation Debian Installer has been released for the i386, powerpc, and ia64 platforms.