Debian

One of the great things about Debian is the wide range of kernels it supports can run. This gives the user the flexibility to not spend time on the common userland stuff. For example, most apps, package management and system admin tasks are common across all Debian platforms.

These platforms may not be optimal at par to Linux, but still, choice is good.

For long, I had used Debian GNU/Hurd, only on a KVM hypervisor. Recently being involved in VirtualBox maintenance, I’ve almost beeing using VirtualBox for all my virtualization tasks. So it was time to try out Hurd on VirtualBox.

This is a follow up to the previous post regarding Reporting bugs with Apport

Apport, version 2.2.3-2, has been pushed to experimental. There were some nice feedback that led to some more changes that I will talk here.

**Opt out: **As a developer, if you see the volume of reports to be annoying, you have the option to opt out of apport reports. To do this, you should specify the XBS-Apport: No field in your package ’s control file. When your application crashes, apport first checks for that field in your package’s description and acts based on what you chose.

Many of the SAN components in Debian have me involved. So I think out to give an update on what the state of SAN would be in Debian Wheezy.

Open-iSCSI : Just uploaded a newer version to experimental which eventually will crawl into testing. It should fix all release goals for Wheezy. Please give it a good test

iscsitarget : Same goes here. This one is already in testing. Please test. It has some bugs reported, all in needinfo, as they haven’t been easily reproducible or reported complete.

apport just cleared the new queue and is now available in experimental. For those who do not know what apport is:

Debugging program crashes without any automated tools has been pretty time consuming and hard for both developers and users. Many program crashes remain unreported or unfixed because:

• Many crashes are not easily reproducible.

• End users do not know how to prepare a report that is really useful for developers, like building a package with debug symbols, operating gdb, etc.

• A considerable part of bug triage is spent with collecting relevant information about the crash itself, package versions, hardware architecture, operating system version, etc.

• There is no easy frontend which allow users to submit detailed problem reports.

• Existing solutions like bug-buddy or krash are specific to a particular desktop environment, are nontrivial to adapt to the needs of a distribution developer, do not work for crashes of background servers (like a database or an email server), and do not integrate well with existing debug packages that a distribution might provide.

Apport is a system which

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With the final package, [fcoe-utils](http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fcoe- utils.html), clearing the NEW packages queue, the Open-FCoE project’s Fibre Channel over Ethernet stack is now in the Debian archive. I had anticipated to have access to FCoE hardware by the time the packaging would complete but that didn ’t work out. It has been delayed, hence the packages are in experimental. If you have access to FCoE hardware, please test and provide your feedback.

I was invited to talk at the Mukthi 11.04 event hosted at the M. S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology.

I talked about Free Software/Debian - Philosophy, Design, Merits. The focus was more on the philosophical aspects of why Free Software/Debian. The slides are available here.

A small talk I gave about Debian and its merits at the ILGUD on 18th of April, 2004.

Useful documentation about my notebook, Compaq Presario 2203AL, running Debian

The following talk is all about Debian for which I was made to speak at the ILUGD meet held on the 18th of April 2004. Most of the references in this talk has been taken from Manoj Srivastava’s (Lead Debian Developer) talk.

/* Begins

Why Debian

Debian – Philosophy, Merits and Key Features

Philosophy ** **

Philosophy is the most durable differentiating criterion between the operating systems we are considering. Performance numbers change. Ease of use, reliability, availability of software – all these characteristics change over time, and you have to go out and re-evaluate them over time.