Entries by Nico Golde

As the title of the book suggests, this isn't about GNU/Linux. It's
not about the GNU programs that come with the Debian distribution.
Instead, the book with its 600 pages (incl. a Debian sarge DVD) is
fully loaded. Martin F. Krafft, an active Debian developer, goes
through great lengths to describe the interplay of Debian's tools,
and the project's philosophy.

Krafft begins with an introduction to Debian, its history, and the
philosophy of free software to bootstrap the reader into the matter.
Introductory topics such as Debian's installation or the
organization of the project are also covered and offer the reader
a comprehensive picture of Debian.

Subsequently, things become more complex. He describes the Debian
package management in all its glory: the interaction between dpkg
and the frontends (apt, aptitude, synaptic, etc.), and
peculiarities of the system, such as Debian package version
numbering. Furthermore, a large part of the tools, that make an
administrator's day-to-day life easier, are presented and explained
in detail. The book is especially suited for administrators as it
identifies typical problems with the distribution, and offers
solutions to counter them.

Topics of primary relevance to developers, such as packaging, are
also extensively covered. It struck positively that the author
also examines newer, alternative build tools, such as yada and cdbs,
and describes manual packaging, that is package creation without the
use of debhelper. This is one of the reasons why this book is of
particular interest to prospective developers and people, who have
to build their own packages for whatever reason. New maintainers can
draw from the book a good overview of the knowledge required to
become a Debian developer.

Krafft manages to illustrate topics such as APT pinning, which have
a reputation of being complicated and daunting, in an accessible
way. For inexperienced Debian users, this book will also be
a pleasant read. It is not, however, a topical user-oriented book.

Instead, the book targets administrators, developers, and those that
work with Debian on a regular basis. Nevertheless, even long-time
users will most certainly find new and interesting stuff between the
covers. Whoever considers the information on the Debian website to
be too dry will find in this book an enticing alternative.

In my opinion, the book has the potential to become the future
Debian Bible. It is nice to see that Martin F. Krafft regularly
publishes additional information and errata on the book's website
http://debiansystem.info .

garbeam and me started to write a new IRC client because it seems that all IRC clients suck because of their bloat.
The name will be ii for irc it or maybe irc improved
We will not make a curses or gtk based client. The goal is to write a client which creates an irc filesystem.
In your $HOME you will find the directories irc/$SERVERNAME/$CHANNELNAME and an in and out file in this directory.
If you change the channel of course new directories will be created. The out file is a normal file in which all the output
of the IRC server and this channel will be gathered. It should be readable with your favorite pager. Maybe we will write
a pager too.

The in file will be a FIFO in which you can write for example with echo "/join #channel".
This will make it very easy to write frontends like curses or gtk.
For every new channel ii will fork and will just work for this channel like a daemon.
The out file is like a log file, every output will be written to it. So there is no need for IRC logging or the lastlog feature.
Maybe we will use logration for it.n
Our goal is to reduce the basic code of this to 500 lines of code.

I will inform you about the development status. But don't bargain for a quick release cause we both are very busy.

I released yacpi 2.0.

Many things are fixed for now.
The changelog is small but I would consider yacpi as very stable now so I decided to make a major release:

- fix display of battery state (before every time charging was displayed)
- completed support for multiple batteries (new command line option -m)
- some code cleanup
- changed display of battery status if terminal width is small
- fastened execution of yacpi (2x)



Until the package is in the pool you can find debian packages on: http://nion.modprobe.de/debian/yacpi/

Ok, seems that WeeChat has got almost all features I used in irssi so none is missing except from lastlog. This isn't implemented yet but the development of WeeChat is active.
For people who are new to weechat maybe the option:
set irc_dislay_away=off is important because it prevents weechat from sending public away messages which
are not welcome in almost every irc channels.

Another thing is that I discovered a segfault in the source code of weechat. The command line argument length isn't
checked so if you use an argument with a huge length it will crash.
I mailed this bug to the upstream source and hopefully they will fix it soon.

Today I found WeeChat which seems to be a nice alternative to
Irssi.

Why using weechat and not irssi? (from the FAQ)
- many GUI (Curses, Gtk, wxWidgets, Qt)
- nicklist available in all GUI
- extensible with scripts (Perl, Python, Ruby)
- horizontal and vertical window split
- infobar highlight
- FIFO pipe for remote control
- developed from scratch (not based on any other IRC client)
- multi-platform
- 100% GPL and free

The look and feel is very similar to irssi but weechat is written from scratch and the source code
only has got half of the lines of code irssi has. Thats one of the big arguments for me!

Here is a screenshot (click to enlarge):

Yeah, I got it.
Yesterday I got my enrollment approval for the university.
On 1. of October I will start to study computer science at the "Technische Universtität" in Berlin.
Hopefully it was the right choice

The doom community is one of the strangest I know.

One of the guys hacked nxdoom to let it run on the Ipod.

Have a look on: http://www.ipodlinux.org/Doom.

There are also two videos available.
Oh I need an Ipod too

BookZilla is an online book store like for example Amazon.

The main intenetion of bookzilla is to support Free Software.
5% of every bought book will go the the FSF Europe.
BookZilla has about 1.2 million books and the topics range from Belletristik, Computer, Erotik and many others. So not
only books about software.

I requested to remove my blog temporary from planet.debian.org
because something is going wrong with s9y OR planet.debian.org. Sometimes the entries of my blog are listed
more than one time in the planet. Today the fetchmail entries of this blog were posted again into the planet.

I am not shure why the posts are marked as updated for planet.debian.org and I have no idea why this should be the case.
Other plants like deifl's or the one of redtux don't seem to have the same problems with it.

Does anyone of you had/have the same problems with serendipity?

I updated my s9y blog to a new version.

It seems that some people had troubles with the update from 0.8.2 to 0.8.3 or higher.
Here is what I have done and what works for me:
Unpack the tarball:

tar xvfz serendipity-version.tar.gz
cd serendipity
sudo cp -rp * ~nion/public_html/blog/
cd ^[. ( cd ESC . for the lazy ones cd ~nion/public_html/blog/ for those who don't understand)
chmod 1777 templates_c

The you have to go to your web interface and follow the instructions.
That worked for me!