WEBlog -- Wouter's Eclectic Blog

Wed, 31 Aug 2011

Debian-installer support for NBD

Folkert asks, not without reason, whether my debian-installer support for NBD is available for testing. The answer is: yes, it is!

At DebConf11 in Banja Luka, I sat down with Otavio, who helped me get the necessary modules uploaded in the correct way. As such, you can now install debian to an NBD device with a regular debian-installer build—although for now, you'll probably still need a daily build to get it to work[1].

To test, you should do the following:

Download a daily image for your architecture.
Either boot d-i with the extra boot-time argument modules=partman-nbd, or boot it in expert mode and select the partman-nbd module in the the 'download installer components' menu.

And that's it! Everything else should Just Work(tm).

Well, almost. There's some loose ends that I need to fix, which I haven't had the time to look into yet. Hopefully that won't take too long.

[1] It's possible that cdimage builds will work too, but I haven't tested that.

Thu, 18 Aug 2011

Happy Birthday, Debian!

Okay, I'm a few days late, but still.

The 16th of August is Debian's birthday. It was on the 16th of August, 1993, that Ian Murdock announced the 'imminent' release of "the Debian Linux Release".

As such, this year Debian celebrates its 18th birthday. It's incredible, but this means that if Debian was a person, it could now legally drink hard liquor. At least in some jurisdictions.

What's more incredible is that I just realized that, since I've been involved with Debian for over 10 years, I've actually got first-hand experience for more than half Debian's lifetime.

Time sure flies.

Tue, 26 Jul 2011

The things I find myself doing today.

Building debian-installer for m68k

...which requires localechooser

...which build-depends on python-lxml (amongst other things)

...which is uninstallable

...which contains some pythonesque source files that are converted into 6.7M C files (by something called "Cython")

...which is then compiled against python2.6. That takes somewhere between half an hour and one hour on this ARAnyM emulated box (I haven't timed, actually).

...a step which is then repeated for python2.7, and possibly more (I haven't gotten that far yet).

...and this file is located in a directory with dozens more of those pythonesque source files

Looks like this is going to take a while. I should probably look into getting distcc set up.

/en/computer/debian/m68k

Mon, 25 Jul 2011

m68k revival

If you thought Debian/m68k was dead and buried and where happy about it, I'm sorry to disappoint you.

The reason m68k had died out slightly was not that we'd lost interest, or that we'd been kicked out of the archive, or anything of the sorts, as I've seen people believe. Instead, the reasons were fully technical: glibc past some particular version needs TLS (thread-local storage) support, which hadn't been implemented for m68k yet, and nobody within the Debian/m68k team had the expertise to work on this. That was all.

Not so long ago, some people within RedHat had started doing a TLS implementation for m68k, however. This was paid for by one of their customers who needed the ColdFire to work, and therefore it was focused mostly on ColdFire. However, ColdFire is close enough to plain old m68k that it was possible to port this TLS support to plain old without too much effort. Unfortunately, most of our machines were pretty much nonfunctional by that time; so in order to get things to work, we'd have to

Reinstall some of our machines, fix the others, without a functional installer,
Do the necessary porting and package integration work,
Rebootstrap the architecture,
do other things necessary (such as providing a working installer, etc).

Not quite impossible, but still a lot of work that would need someone to put in quite an amount of time. This wasn't something that people in the m68k port could invest; and I'm also not sure we had the necessary skills amongst the team to do the necessary porting.

So the work lay there, and it wasn't being done. Until one Thorsten Glaser, author of a shell called 'mksh' that I hadn't heard of until then, came along, and noted that his mksh package wasn't being built for m68k. Upon investigating, he discovered, as expected, that the port was almost dead. Now most people would leave it at that and decide that they couldn't build for an architecture that wasn't being maintained anymore—and that would be perfectly fine— but not Thorsten. On the brink of death, he almost single-handedly revived the m68k port, and got stuff to work to such an extent that it is now again possible to build a working and fairly up-to-date Linux/m68k ARAnyM virtual machine.

As I'm typing this, my ARAnyM instance is checking out the d-i repository (so I can start building d-i), and building sudo at the same time.

Let's see what comes from this.

/en/computer/debian/m68k

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Wed, 29 Jun 2011

NBD support in debian-installer

... is now working.

It isn't finished yet; there are still some loose ends. But at least it works; if you combine this kernel with this debian-installer image, you'll be able to install to an NBD target.

Known bugs:

if you install your root device on an NBD device, the installer will attempt to install a boot loader to the local hard disk. Make sure to bring it into expert mode before the tasksel part to avoid overwriting your MBR -- or do what I did, and install to a (virtual) diskless computer.
Also, due to an issue with the initscripts package, halt will make the kernel panic rather than power down the system—but at that point it's safe to switch off the power, anyway.
The installer currently fails to add a nbdroot= parameter to the kernel command line when installing root to NBD. When you're rebooting into the installed system, you should add something like nbdroot=<server>,<port> to your kernel command line, otherwise the installed system will not find the root device.

Other than that, it should work fine; testing is welcome (but note standard development code caveats apply).

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Wed, 20 Apr 2011

beid software version 4

No, it hasn't been released yet, but they're working on it.

We've not been doing much about beid since squeeze was released, mostly because we understood that version 4 of the software was quite close, and that working on some 3.x version in that light would not make much sense anymore. But that doesn't mean I haven't done anything about it, at all; a while back, the FedICT people contracted me to help them build Debian packages they could put an 'official' stamp on, and provide through their website or some such. Some pre-release versions of these packages are now available through their google code project, and it would be welcome if people could try them out and give feedback.

Links:

The middleware package contains the browser plugin, which doubles as the PKCS#11 library. It should even auto-install, which the packages currently in the archive don't (due to technical reasons that would take us too far).
The viewer contains an application that allows you to view the data on your eID card, print out a page with identity information, etc. It's not required for everyone, but can be interesting none the less.

In both cases, look under 'featured downloads'. These contain snapshot builds that should be fairly stable, but are not officially supported yet. Alternatively, you can track the head of the code (packages that are built automatically upon commit) by going to some alternative pages for the middleware and the viewer. Feedback is welcome, preferably through the relevant Google Code bugtrackers.

/en/computer/debian/belpic

Wed, 09 Mar 2011

NBD in d-i

Success!

It only took, erm,

wouter@celtic:~/debian/debian-installer-wouter/partman-nbd/debian$ cat changelog 
partman-nbd (0.1) UNRELEASED; urgency=low

  * Initial release.

 -- Wouter Verhelst   Fri, 28 Dec 2007 11:45:43 +0100

just over three years, but I've finally gotten it to work. More or less.

That is to say, I have a VM currently running which is finishing up an installation. It hasn't completed yet, but it's gotten past the critical point now and I'm hopeful that a reboot test will be successful. If it is, I'll need to make sure that the updates that I've done on the live installer to massage it into running are committed to packages too, and then I'm all set.

Looks like you'll be able to install wheezy on a system without hard disk. How's that for 'Universal operating system'?

/en/computer/debian/d-i

Sun, 13 Feb 2011

PMW uploaded

Earlier today (or, well, last night, since it's fairly late alrady) I uploaded pmw (about which I blogged previously). In preparation for that, I've also uploaded aspic, which is required to build pmw's documentation.

While I'm quite fond of pmw already, and intend to maintain it inside Debian for quite some time, my interest in aspic is limited to the fact that I need it for pmw. So if anyone seems interested in adopting it... be my guest. But do talk to me, first.

In my previous blog post, I've raved about how I like pmw much more than I do lilypond. I had two reasons for that, at the time:

faster in processing
better syntaxis

Now, I have a third:

wouter@celtic:~$ grep-available --eregex -FPackage -sInstalled-Size -sPackage '(pmw|lilypond)'
Installed-Size: 1916
Package: pmw

Installed-Size: 7048
Package: lilypond-data

Installed-Size: 392344
Package: lilypond-doc

Installed-Size: 896
Package: pmw-doc

Installed-Size: 4184
Package: lilypond

Less than two megs for pmw, versus over ten for lilypond and lilypond-data combined; and less than a megabyte for complete documentation plus examples for pmw, versus several hundred megs for lilypond-doc.

And it's not because pmw is less flexible, or has less features, or is less well documented, or anything of the sorts. It does have less output options; but then it's not like it's hard to convert PostScript into something else or anything.