Joey reported that websec failed him for reading modifications in web pages when reading the generated mails in a text mail agent. I wanted to point out that websec has ASCII marker support to highlight changes in text for this purpose exactly. This feature was implemented by Javier M. Mora.

Unfortunately I have an ATI display card in my laptop, it is a wide screen laptop and so far I used the 1024x768 resolution instead of the native 1280x768. Some girl (sorry, forgot your name and you're not in mugshots) prodded me to fix that since my screen looked pretty warped. Today I finally got to do it and install fglrx to get my native resolution working and boy, is it a change!

The ingredients for this recipe:

1. A computer with ATI display driver
2. Debian unstable (though testing and etch should work as well)
3. A network connection

Instructions:

1. su -
2. aptitude install fglrx-control fglrx-driver fglrx-driver-dev fglrx-kernel-src modula-assistant linux-headers-2.6-686
3. m-a -t auto-install fglrx
4. aticonfig -f --install
5. Restart X, you can do it with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, or just restart the computer
6. Enjoy the beautiful new look of your desktop!

If you are using an AMD machine replace the linux-headers-2.6-686 with linux-headers-2.6-k7.

A while ago I bought an MSI laptop, model S420. The sound didn't work but normally I don't really need it anyway so it was never an important issue. A few days ago I started using powertop to understand why my laptop can live on battery for less than two hours. One problem I have with powertop is that I don't get enough information on the C-states of the CPU, they are controlled by the BIOS so I went to the MSI website to hunt for a BIOS upgrade. During the course of this hunt I found an old patch for sound drivers for other models of MSI laptops and in them I found hints for my own sound card. Some guesswork and a single try and I found a patch that makes the sound work me.

I didn't find an explanation or a changelog for the bios upgrades so I didn't try them yet but the patch to get the sound working is following. It is for kernel 2.6.22-rc2 but it should easily be adapted to other kernels, it's just a one-liner. The patch was accepted (in variation) into the ALSA repository and will probably show up in kernel 2.6.23.

--- 2.6-rc2/sound/pci/hda/patch_realtek.c	2007-05-19 13:56:54.000000000 +0300
+++ 2.6.22-rc2/sound/pci/hda/patch_realtek.c	2007-05-25 00:42:42.000000000 +0300
@@ -6389,6 +6389,7 @@
 	SND_PCI_QUIRK(0x1462, 0x4314, "MSI", ALC883_TARGA_DIG),
 	SND_PCI_QUIRK(0x1462, 0x4319, "MSI", ALC883_TARGA_DIG),
 	SND_PCI_QUIRK(0x1462, 0x4324, "MSI", ALC883_TARGA_DIG),
+	SND_PCI_QUIRK(0x1462, 0x3729, "MSI", ALC883_TARGA_DIG),
 	SND_PCI_QUIRK(0x1462, 0xa422, "MSI", ALC883_TARGA_2ch_DIG),
 	SND_PCI_QUIRK(0x1025, 0, "Acer laptop", ALC883_ACER),
 	SND_PCI_QUIRK(0x161f, 0x2054, "Medion laptop", ALC883_MEDION),

KVM is a Kernel-based Virtual Machine for Linux, it has a kernel module that enables a modified Qemu to use the Intel VT extension for full virtualisation, with the benefit of making the virtualisation very fast. In the future it will also support the SVM extension of AMD.

It will be available in Debian once the ftp-masters clear the backlog, and is currently available in a temporary location. The manpage is missing but the instructions to get it to work are:

• sudo apt-get install kvm kvm-source
• sudo m-a build kvm
• sudo m-a install kvm
• sudo modprobe kvm

At this stage you have KVM ready for usage, simply use the kvm program as if it was the Qemu program, to boot a Debian Live CD use: kvm -cdrom live.iso -boot d

In the future the KVM patches will be merged into both the kernel and Qemu and these packages will be gone, but for now, that's the easiest way to use KVM.

Update: KVM entered the archive, instructions above were updated.

Des Traynor made a very nice roundup of various IDEs and development environments. These were collected from friends of his and it was quite a shock to find Notepad in there!

Planets are a fairly common method to aggregate blogs. They are especially pervasive in the FOSS world, with planets for Debian, Gnome, KDE, and many others.

I find planets as a useful resource for a community to give a single place for the communication and to check for updates. The usual method of communication in blogs is a reply in a post, the planet makes the replies come in the same page for the reader with little context loss.

For this reason I'm also fond of setting up planets myself for those communities that lack them, and so I setup planets for FOSS-IL for Israeli blogs about FOSS issues (mostly in Hebrew), Planet (former) Advogato for former Advogato bloggers and the latest one is Planet MicroISV for MicroISVs.

I was asked to provide some (tutorial|help|something) on setting up a planet, and this post is the answer to that request.

The PlanetPlanet program is a very common RSS feed aggregator, it works with most feeds and is fairly tolerant to non-standard-conforming feeds. It is also relatively low maintenance, which is why I chose it for my aggregators.

Prerequisites

The first thing you'll need is to make sure you have Python 2.2 or better installed. If you're on a sane OS, you can just do apt-get install python2.3 otherwise you are left to fend for yourself. For the Windows folks there is ActivePython.

Another would be prerequisite is Bazaar, two implementations for the Distributed Revision Control algorithm which was pioneered in GNU Arch. Bazaar would be more user friendly, but both IMNSHO are horrendous user-interface wise. Which is why I provide a snapshot of the latest revision for your benefit.

Install

Installation would be fairly simple, just unpack the tar.gz and it's installed, nothing else needs to be done, except configuring it.

The snapshot I provided is just a raw dump of the arch repository, it is useful as is since you can update the installation as needed by just updating and merging with Arch/Bazaar. This will not be covered here. Too much of a trouble for now, and the PlanetPlanet development is at the pace of a snail carrying an elephant, don't expect updates in the near future.

Configure

I assume you have in mind the list of blogs you want to put on the planet. It need not be comprehensive, a few blogs to start would be good enough. It's trivial to add more as you go.

In the planet directory you should copy the examples directory to a new one, say myplanet, copy the output directory to myplanet-output and edit the myplanet/config.ini file.

At the minimum you should change the following variables:

• name – The name of your planet
• link – The URL where you planet will live, used inside the feeds the planet exports
• owner_name and owner_email – obvious isn't it?
• output_dir – that should be myplanet-output according to the instructions above
• template_files – change and replace examples with myplanet

The next stage would be to replace the existing blog listed in the config.ini file with your own list. The example is there and is trivial to follow, the entry for a blog looks like:

[http://baruch.ev-en.org/blog/index.rss2]
name = Baruch Even

Where the feed URL is in square brackets and the name of the blog is the name. There are various games that are possible with the templates but we'll ignore them for now and let you learn them from the examples provided by the authors.

The next stage is just to run the planet on the new files, we will use the defaults for the rest.

python planet.py myplanet/config.ini

The planet will work for a while, churn out various uninteresting messages and generate the files we asked it for in the myplanet-output. You can now inspect the files in the output directory, load them in a browser and enjoy.

Tweaks

So you haven't left yet? Want some more info?

One obvious question is now that we have the files, how do we serve them to the world so everyone can enjoy our creation? First, you should ask yourself if the world really cares... you do, ah?! OK. If the world cares enough it will find a way to show you how to do it. Since it depends on your OS, web server and various configurations, I can't help you on this. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

The configuration in config.ini should be fairly obvious and is well commented. The look of the site depends on two factors, the HTML that is generated, which is a clean HTML version 4.01 and has all formatting controlled by the CSS file which was kindly provided in the outputs directory.

The templating code is very simple, it has two operations, TMPL_LOOP and TMPL_VAR. TMPL_LOOP will loop over a variable, usually the Channels variable. And the TMPL_VAR operator will emit that variable, there are the global vars and the loop vars. The best way to figure it out is to use the existing templates as a building block, they are fairly easy to understand.

Enjoy your new Planet!

My graphical skills are known to be poor but I still managed to use the gimp to create a hackergotchi for myself out of the ugly image from my student web page. The hackergotchi was quickly added to the Debian Planet, before I regret that move.

I probably should raid my digital photos for a better picture, if a skilled hackergotchi maker is interested in making something more palatable I'd be happy to privately offer some other possible pictures for the conversion.

Congratulations to all whose projects were accepted, Debian received 60 eligible proposals, many of those were great projects which we would have loved to accept but we only had 10 slots that are paid for by Google so the competition was tough.

The accepted projects are:

• "Improve the boot system" by Carlos Villegas
• "Translation Coordination System" by Gintautas Miliauskas
• "BTS GUI front-end" by Philipp Kern
• "debian-cd-ng" by Carlos Parra Camargo
Debtags, using AI classifiers for automating the tagging of Debian packages" by Alex de Landgraaf
• "Distribution wide-tracker tools (DWTT) and collaborative repository of meta-informations about source packages (CRMI)" by Arnaud Fontaine
• "Automation of Debian Based live-cd creation process" by Robert Pickel
• "Improve Britney, the scripts used to update testing" by FABIO TRANCHITELLA
• "Debian installer on Debian GNU/Hurd" by Matheus Eduardo B. Morais
• "BitTorrent Extensions" by Matthew Wronka

All the accepted projects received email to them and their mentor, if you are a student whose project wasn't accepted, we'd still be happy if you will do the project even without the funding, if you need a helping hand or a mentor we will surely be happy to help you out, contact me at baruch@debian.org.

The plan is that students who have a blog or setup one for the Summer of Code will be added to Planet Debian so everyone can follow their progress on their quest to help Debian improve.

Cheers and thanks to everyone who helped make this happen!
Baruch Even
Debian SoC coordinator

Debian is officially in the Google Summer of Code 2006 program, we already have some projects. If you have more ideas/requests add them to the wiki, if you are willing to be a mentor the details were sent to -private.

If you are a student and have a project that you want to do for Debian, add it to the wiki.

A cool Vi/ViM tutorial is available from a developer of a Vi plugin for Visual Studio. I don't know about the plugin, but the tutorial is very nicely done and the resulting cheatsheet graphics is excellent!