Recently I went through the process of getting my new key (C99E03CC is dead, long live 43C30A7D!) signed to replace the old one in the Debian keyring. Some people used caff to send out their signatures and in 3 different cases I did not receive the signature for my @debian.org uid, leaving me somewhat dumbfounded as signatures for other uids went through just fine, as did various test emails to my @debian.org address. After pestering people on IRC and discussing the issue with one of the signers, we concluded that Debian's mail servers are configured to reject any mail with invalid envelope-From header - and chances that caff-sent email is going to have an invalid one are pretty high. As far as I can tell, a valid configuration is such that

echo ${USER}@$(cat /etc/mailname)

returns a valid email address. So, if you are a caff user, please make sure that your system is configured correctly before sending out signatures with it, namely that the emails sent using something like

echo 'test' | mail ${YOU}@debian.org

are getting through successfully.

Challenge accepted: http://wooyd.org/qr :-).

Let me explain something to you: jacking up prices for your laptops by 10% on June 1st and simultaneously declaring an "incredible, 5-days only, 10% off sale on all Thinkpads" on your website is not how your sell more laptops. That's how you make your potential customers recognize that they are probably better off looking elsewhere for their next laptop.

Specifically, I'm talking about an Intel-based Thinkpad Edge 11 with 4GB RAM, which was listed at 663 EUR on lenovo.ie before June 1st, but is now, during the "promotion", is listed at 736 EUR. Notably, even after the discount, it still works out to be more expensive than what Amazon UK has to offer, at 552 GBP for the same laptop (NVY5EUK).

Squeeze installer for sparc is affected by a number of problems, discovered late in the release cycle. In particular:

• #608516: niu network driver is not included in installer udebs.
• #610906: pata_cmd64x driver is not included in installer initrd, CD-ROM and hard drives are not detected on systems which require it as a result.
• #602853: kernel does not boot on machines which need atyfb graphics driver, last message seen on the console is "console [tty0] enabled, bootconsole disabled".

These are documented in Squeeze installation notes, however it would be nice to push available fixes for these bugs into the first point release. In order to test the fixes I've created a couple of unofficial Squeeze installer images for sparc, which can be found here. See the README file for details. If you have a sparc system where install is affected by one of these bugs, it would be great if you could try it out and send a report to debian-sparc or directly to me.

There is also #611314 (sym53c8xx module is not loaded automatically), but we don't know what causes it yet. For now just use a simple workaround described in the bug.

This might save someone a good deal of sifting through ancient posts on obscure forums: if you wonder why your SunBlade 1000 workstation refuses to boot off a freshly burned DVD, keep in mind that the standard-issue DVD drive in those machines (typically Toshiba SD-M1401) is pretty picky about the DVD media type used. Trying to boot off DVD-R discs invariably failed for me with a "read failed" error, while the same image burned onto a DVD+R blank worked like a charm.

Long ago I've set up a small but occasionally useful service on merkel: Debian Official Kernel Configuration files. It extracts and stores the configuration files from all kernel packages ever uploaded to the archive (does not seem to work particularly well with stuff uploaded to experimental though). Now that merkel is going away, this service is likely going to die. If you care about things like that, and would like to see it continue beyond merkel's demise, feel free to grab the script code and historical config files, and set it up elsewhere (it's not likely that I'm going to bother).

For a very long time my laptop (running sid for a few years now) has been booting kind of slowly. It looked like there was a 2-3 second delay every time a kernel module was loaded, which resulted in something like 3 minutes total boot time. Never bothered me enough, but yesterday I've finally got some time to investigate. After increasing the verbosity of udev logging in /etc/udev/udev.conf I've found lots and lots of messages like this in the log:

Dec 18 00:41:46 droopy udevd-work[425]: wait for '/sys/some/path/bInterfaceProtocol' for 20 mseconds

The only udev rule file containing a reference to bInterfaceProtocol was /etc/udev/rules.d/z60_libccid.rules with the following lines in it:

# last file created by the kernel, if this is present everything should be
WAIT_FOR_SYSFS="bInterfaceProtocol"

The libccid package itself is long gone (I don't remember installing it at all), and the versions of the package starting with 1.3.4-1 (uploaded in February 2008) do not contain this rule. However, the file survived on my system, so this rule was continuing to trigger for every device, even the ones not providing the bInterfaceProtocol at all. Removing the now-redundant file resulted in a dramatic boot speedup (it now takes about 30 seconds), so if you are experiencing similar problems, you might want to check it out.

Even though I'm not using my blog too much, it's nice to be able to post to Planet occasionally, so I've restored it to working condition. It's now powered by ikiwiki, let's see if Planet picks it up.