La Salle Debain

Debian Weekly News had a pointer to an article in Linuxworld (the website not the expo) called Debian & carelessness mix well in which Nicholas Petreley woefully tells the tale of how he accidently deleted his /var partition. There is a happy ending though.

When I first saw the floor plan for Linuxworld and saw they had put the .orgs in front instead of a ghetto at the back as usual, I thought "uh-oh, the Linux industry must really be in the toilet." Attendence had been dropping the past two years and to me this was just one more sign of impending doom. (Of course Debian itself is immune to the vagaries of the market but developers have to eat.) However my cynicism was misplaced. Attendence was good and the show itself seemed bigger than ever. I was surprised that the crowds were so thick in the daytime and practically non-existant during after-work hours. I think this shows that Linux is becoming less of a "hobby" and more important to businesses. Or perhaps only business types attend shows like Linuxworld.

It turns out that a Sunblade 100 actually doesn't run Linux that well. So we spent most of today displaying Solaris 9 or a Boot PROM prompt. A real great advertisement for Debian eh? Anthony Awtrey and Clint Adams made valiant efforts and by the end of the day we did get Debian installed. (It turned out the video card was to blame. Go figure.)

Also at the booth were Matt Taggart and Brian Nelson. During the day, Roger So, Anthony Wong, Andres Salomon and Susan Kleinmann stopped by. Sue even signed my key! I also met new maintainer applicants Joe Nahmias and Yaegashi Takeshi. "Celebrities" visiting the booth included Bruce Perens and Ian Murdock who somehow I pictured to be much older.

An innovation in the Debian booth this year was free stuff (the flyers I had talked about a few days ago .) Which no doubt explained the extra traffic we got. No matter how little they actually need any of it, trade show attendees are drawn like moths to the flame of free junk. We also sold CDs (for the nominal price of $1 just to discourage the people looking for free stuff.) and t-shirts for $15. The slogan for the t-shirts this year is "And you thought space was big" No it doesn't refer to the size of the average Debian developers belly.

Because I had the four boxes of T-shirts Shaleh sent me, I decided to take the car into the city. What was I thinking? I tried to be clever and take the Holland Tunnel because I know the Lincoln Tunnel is always jammed but I forgot to take into account the fact that the Jacob Javits Center (where the expo is held) is right next to the Lincoln Tunnel approaches so I got snarled up in Lincoln Tunnel traffic anyway. When I finally crawl into the center, the teamsters tell me I can't unload stuff right at the doors of the center itself and I would have to park elsewhere. And now Bloomberg is trying to plug the budget gap with parking ticket money, I couldn't risk just parking on the street. So I had to find an (outrageously expensive) garage a couple of blocks away and schlep my four (heavy) boxes and other assorted junk in the bitter cold. I had planned to be there by 12:30pm but due to all these problems, didn't actually get to the booth until 2pm.

Sun is lending us a SunBlade 100 with flat-screen monitor which I picked up from their booth. It's got Solaris 9 on it but we'll reformat and put Debian on it of course. Unfortunately I left my netinstall CD at home so that will be the first order of business tomorrow morning.

We're booth #17 in the .org pavilion. Stop by and say hello if you can.

The only major service not covered by webmin is the Exim mail server. Luckily Alexandre Mathieu has created one. If he wants to become a Debian developer I'll sponsor his package or upload it myself.

If you had an apt source beginning with http://www.braincells.com/debian/ and you suddenly noticed you are getting 404s, please be advised you should be using:

	deb http://src.braincells.com/debian woody/
	deb-src http://src.braincells.com/debian woody/

for woody, and

	deb http://src.braincells.com/debian sid/
	deb-src http://src.braincells.com/debian sid/

for sid/sarge instead. This change actually happened a long time ago but there was a redirect in effect which I only removed yesterday.

The Linuxworld Conference arrives this week. Today I got the T-shirts from Shaleh and made 1000 flyers.There's some talk about a Debian dinner but where and what hasn't been decided yet.

Chip McCormick is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at SUNY Albany. He is doing research in Sociology/Organizational Studies focused on the way that open source groups organize work. He interviewed me over the phone for about 2.5 hours today asking me about how Debian works and what I thought about it.

Personally, I'm amazed that Debian works at all!

Don Marti wrote an article called Fixing HTML with the WDG HTML Validator which says

...I installed it in minutes from the Debian packages

In debian-user , Jean-Marc Liotier offers the following recipe for logging in to a remote host via SSH without having to give a password.

  
. 	# Local end :
	cd ~/.ssh
	# Enter an empty password when prompted by the following command
	ssh-keygen -t dsa -f id_dsa
	scp id_dsa.pub user@remote.end.net:~/.ssh
	# Repeat last command for all remote ends
	
	# Remote end
	test -d .ssh || mkdir .ssh
	chmod 700 ~/.ssh
	cd ~/.ssh
	touch authorized_keys2
	cat id_dsa.pub >> authorized_keys2
	chmod 640 authorized_keys2
	rm -f id_dsa.pub
	
	# Local end :
	ssh -l user remote.end.net
	# Look ma, no password !

Images of UNIX versions 5, 6, and 7 have been debianized and can be run using a PDP-11 emulator such as the one in simh. The package names are pdp11-unix-v5, pdp11-unix-v6, and pdp11-unix-v7.