JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I HATE HashKnownHosts SOOOO MUCH
About a month ago, I submitted a project request to Savannah. It made sense at the time to host it there for a variety of reasons, but now I am still waiting for project approval.
I am told that the reason my very exciting project is sitting there collecting moss is that there is a lack of reviewers.
So if you want to help Savannah out, you should write to savannah-hackers-public@gnu.org.
It has been over 5 years since we voted on the GNU FDL. At the time I was misled by certain people who insisted that they had inside knowledge and that the GFDL was going to be fixed within the year.
The FDL is still a bad license, and the successor meant to be less bad, the GSFDL, has not progressed beyond a discussion draft from September 2006.
Personally, I feel dirty having voted the way I did. We compromised our principles and ended up in a stalemate that many people on either side of the issue are still unhappy about to this day.
Hopefully I have learned my lesson.
Receiving a full rejection for DebConf travel sponsorship reminds me of a time I was asked to nominate members for a corporate board of directors.
At the time I replied that I would not be of much help because I value things which are irrelevant to such positions. Sure, I can identify worthless, grandstanding blowhards, but of the people who are not, I am unqualified to guess which ones make good board members and which do not.
The person who had asked me was somewhat confused by my answer, because we come from different perspectives on how the world works and possibly how the world should work.
The DreamPlug is like a GuruPlug Server-Plus with a few notable differences:
- A separable power supply and thus none of the heating problems that plagues the GuruPlugs. My GuruPlug neither has a fan nor overheats, but other people seem to whine about these things incessantly
- Sound card with TOSLINK out
- Instead of 512 megs of NAND, it has 2 megs of SPI flash and a 2-gig microSD card inside
- It doesn't come preloaded with Debian
So let's say you want to put Debian on your DreamPlug. You do, of course, because running some other operating system is in poor taste, and you'd be embarrassed telling your friends. How do you do it? You can't use d-i.
Let me back up. In the onboard SPI flash, there is a copy of Das U-Boot. This is a fork of mainline U-Boot, with no complete and corresponding source available. To the casual observer, this might look like an egregious GPL violation, but, on the other hand, no one seems to know how to rewrite the SPI flash except from U-Boot itself, so if you happen to corrupt said flash, your plug is bricked and openocd can't save you. I would be happy to be proven wrong on this last point, but for not let's assume that you're screwed and unable to replace your boot loader with free software.
The next problem is the kernel, which lives on the microSD card. This is potentially free software, though I can't swear that complete and corresponding source code is available. What I can claim is that linux-2.6.33.6.tar.bz2 on Google Code will build a Linux that works on the plug. I will also point out that this doesn't match Linux 2.6.33.6 from kernel.org.
Some other time I should rant about ARM Linux but for now I will just say that if you use the U-Boot of questionable provenance and either the Linux that's shipped with the plug or the one at the above link, you will be able to boot a mostly Debian system. I'll mention the third exception later.
One thing you can do is to take the plug apart, remove the microSD card from its slot, and then stick it into a reader that you can then manipulate on another machine. If you're choosing this route and wish to take this opportunity to replace the microSD card with something larger than 2 gigs, keep in mind that you'll have to either preserve the uImage file from the first partition or build a new one.
I am not fond of cross-architecture anything. I prefer to do things natively rather than cross-compile or foreign-debootstrap, and I own enough armel boxes that I can do this easily. So at this point I would just debootstrap a new Debian base onto the second partition of the microSD card. The first partition contains the uImage (which is your Linux image in a wrapper), and must be a FAT filesystem since you can't replace your boot loader with something that can read a better filesystem. The second partition will be your rootfs and can be whichever filesystem your Linux can read.
If you do not have another armel system to play with, you might want to familiarize yourself with Marco's Sheevaplug instructions.
You can install to a USB stick as well. Just remember that U-Boot needs a FAT filesystem containing the uImage on it and that you can't use a kernel in Debian yet.
You'll also want to ignore the instructions regarding U-Boot, since that must be done differently.
I'll be back later with some more details.
There are rumors that people have successfully integrated ikiwiki with pootle. So where is the code?
There are certain people who are NIH-prone. Usually I consider this insane, but sometimes I sympathize. Certainly I have pulled a NIH once or thrice before.
Maybe I'm one of those old curmudgeons who incorrectly remembers the past, but I have the feeling that software used to work a whole lot better. Admittedly it did less, but it was also less prone to weird semi-failures. I am probably repressing a bunch of kernel oopses in the '90s.
Now though, I can waste a week and a half being miserable as SIP clients fail on me erratically, because I hate Twinkle and no one thought to tell me that Twinkle is really the only SIP client that works.
The interoperability of CalDAV and GroupDAV servers and clients seems to be abysmal. The same even appears to be true of plain ol' WebDAV.
There are multiple forks of Markdown. I blame John Gruber for not maintaining a strong-enough central standard.
No working LUKS-encrypted live images appear to exist in the wild.
The only reliable and useful backup software for my needs was abandoned in 2008.
Everything in Rails is bloated and crazy, except for Redmine. How is Redmine able to transcend? I do not understand.
There is no way you can run an Android phone on only free software.
freeswitch is on crack.
Some things I intended to work on last week but did not:
- deets
- luakit
- armhf
- posh
- MTA fare helper Android app
- replying to an email