Ambrose Andrews znalo@identi.ca

Hiked up the Appalachian Trail a ways to some house-sized boulders where I enjoyed the view.

Link to original post: DPL elections 2016, congratulations Mehdi Dogguy!

The Debian Project Leader elections finished yesterday and the winner is Mehdi Dogguy! Of a total of 1023 developers, 282 developers voted using the Condorcet method.

More information about the result is available in the Debian Project Leader Elections 2016 page.

The new term for the project leader starts today April 17th and expire on April 17th 2017.

Link to original post: https://bits.debian.org/2016/02/tails-installer-in-debian.html

Thu 11 February 2016 by u with tags tails privacy anonymity announce

Tails (The amnesic incognito live system) is a live OS based on Debian GNU/Linux which aims at preserving the user's privacy and anonymity by using the Internet anonymously and circumventing censorship. Installed on a USB device, it is configured to leave no trace on the computer you are using unless asked explicitly.

As of today, the people the most needy for digital security are not computer experts. Being able to get started easily with a new tool is critical to its adoption, and even more in high-risk and stressful environments. That's why we wanted to make it faster, simpler, and more secure to install Tails for new users.

One of the components of Tails, the Tails Installer is now in Debian thanks to the Debian Privacy Tools Maintainers Team.

Tails Installer is a graphical tool to install or upgrade Tails on a USB stick from an ISO image. It aims at making it easier and faster to get Tails up and running.

The previous process for getting started with Tails was very complex and was problematic for less tech-savvy users. It required starting Tails three times, and copying the full ISO image onto a USB stick twice before having a fully functional Tails USB stick with persistence enabled.

This can now be done simply by installing Tails Installer in your existing Debian system, using sid, stretch or jessie-backports, plugging a USB stick and choosing if one wants to update the USB stick or to install Tails using a previously downloaded ISO image.

Tails Installer also helps Tails users to create an encrypted persistent storage for personal files and settings in the rest of the available space.

Now that all the results are in for my county, I see that my 1 vote raised Sander's percentage by 1% in my county.

Primary votes in counties that swing way to the other side have that going for them. This will likely be the only bright spot in the election season for me.

Debian 8 "Jessie" officially released. https://www.debian.org/News/2015/20150426

We'll be attempting some live coverage of the Debian jessie release this weekend. The party happens on pump.io https://identi.ca/debian #releasingjessie

The release team have posted a status report about the Debian jessie release.

Whether or not you like systemd (I am mostly positive, have some mixed feelings, explained below, but am mostly uninformed enough to just trust others' decisions), nobody is doing a better job of making systemd look good than the anti-systemd crowd right now.

I trust the Debian process, and systemd looks good for a lot of things. I actually do share some worries others have, but not too strongly (I wonder: what will Guix do if applications become more systemd dependent... will the project give up on GNU dmd as an init system? And also, will this make it hard for "container'ed" applications a-la docker harder? (Answer seems to be yes)). But I will also fully say: I just don't know enough. And again, having watched the Debian process from here, for Debian, I couldn't be more sure that the process went well. And I would love to convert my init scripts over to systemd's init system, that stuff looks a lot nicer.

Nonetheless, I'm nervous to express any of the above... it's hard to not look like I'm not some kind of anti-systemd person. And given that the anti-systemd crowd seems to be about as poisonous as (and even seems to share actual overlap with) "gamergate" type poisonous people... well... who wants to be associated with those jerks?

And whether or not concerns I have are founded/unfounded, I hope systemd and friends continue to improve... it certainly seems like valuable software in most respects.

BTW, I couldn't care less about the "unix philosophy"... my favorite programs seem to be Emacs, Firefox/Iceweasel, Blender, which are all attacked for violating the Unix philosophy, and all work great, maybe even because of it.

I switched my laptop to systemd-cron. vixie cron is a beloved old thing, but it wakes up once per minute, checks every cron job to see if any need to run, and that's not ideal on a laptop; it wastes battery power.

systemd-cron still has some rough edges, but it avoids doing that; no wakeups until the next time a job is scheduled to run. Actually, systemd-cron is just a few hundred lines of python code, that translate crontabs into systemd service files. It's developed independently of systemd, it just reuses systemd's timer support to implement cron and anacron.

One thing that systemd-cron doesn't support, since a standard crontab cannot express it, is the ability for the system to wake from suspend when a job is scheduled to run. Imagine a backup server that wakes up when the next backup is scheduled, and then goes back to sleep until the next day or next week. Or a mpd box that's not always left on, but wakes up to pull down the latest podcasts at the times their RSS feeds say they'll be published. Systemd does support timers that do that, so it can be done with a custom service file.

... Hmm, or a laptop that wakes up at 7 am to download the morning email blast and optionally to be an alarm clock. I think I might just code that up. :)