Andrew's blog

At the start of July, the LCA2019 team announced that the Call for Proposals for linux.conf.au 2019 were open! This Call for Proposals will close on July 30. If you want to submit a proposal, you don't have much time!

linux.conf.au is one of the best-known community driven Free and Open Source Software conferences in the world. In 2019 we welcome you to join us in Christchurch, New Zealand on Monday 21 January through to Friday 25 January.

For full details including those not covered by this announcement visit https://linux.conf.au/call-for-papers/, and the full announcement is here.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Call for Proposals Opens: 2 July 2018
• Call for Proposals Closes: 30 July 2018 (no extensions)
• Notifications from the programme committee: early-September 2018
• Conference Opens: 21st January 2019

w00t!

Debian Etch is released!

Now it is time to perform the ritual upgrade dance on a bunch of machines that weren't already running Etch while it was the testing distribution. And also I'll need to decide if the boxes that were already running it should move to lenny (which will is the name for the next stable release). I think I'll defer that decision a few months though...

It's kinda funny, I keep on finding little itches that I want to scratch, but never have the time to scratch them all. Before Susanne became pregnant I didn't have much time to scratch them. Now I have less time, and once the baby is born, well, practically none I expect.

I thought I would write down what some of them are on the hope it might focus me so I'll work on them in what spare time I have. Just some of the coding related itches I have are (not in any particular order):

1. Dashboard - I really want to get back into this
   
2. Really Simple CalDAV Store - Just generally get more involved with it.
   
3. Finish an Outlook 2000 calendar to CalDAV importer so Susanne's calendar can be available on the network (using RSCDS).
   
4. OpenSync - I'd like to have my Treo 650 sync nicely with Evolution and various LDAP phone directories. Also, once this is working perhaps Susanne can stop using Outlook (she only uses Outlook because it syncs with her Treo 650).
   
5. Revision control plugin for Tomboy - I use tomboy for note taking on my desktop at work, my desktop at home and a notebook. I use git for my .tomboy directory to keep the Tomboy directory in sync across my work desktop and the notebook. It'd be nice if tomboy automatically added new pages, and committed changed pages for me.
   
6. Improve tagging on the desktop - Leaftag is neat, but I'd like to have integrated support in the Save/Open Gnome dialog window, and have those tags shared amongst other users on my system & network.
   
7. mpd - I would like to integrate Avahi so I don't have to setup environment variables on new machines anymore. The other feature I'd like to add is a basic plugin handler.
   
8. Improve the integration between Asterisk and the Gnome desktop. There are some desktop apps for interacting with Asterisk out there, but they don't have the Gnome feel to them. I've had some ideas of different use cases and how they might be implemented. I'm going to generate some mock UIs soonish.
   

And then there is the ongoing tweaking of my MythTV setup, and all the other neat and nifty things I stumble upon and want to play with.

Unfortunately our arrival in Sydney is going to be delayed by 1 day.

Due to the fog at Wellington airport our flight has been cancelled (after waiting for the fog to clear for 3 hours).
We have been bumped to the same flight tomorrow morning. So we'll be getting up at an insane time tomorrow morning as well. Oh joy.

The only good news is that the flight we're on already had most of the rest of the Catalyst delegation already book on it. Looks like it'll be a - rather subdued - party flight. Oh, actually no, just been told we're on the 0700 flight, the others are on the 0640 flight.

karora and family who are booked with the competition might still be able to fly out today. If only we could switch airlines...

See you in Sydney!

Only 1 sleep to go before Susanne and I leave for linux.conf.au in Sydney. This year they've decided to have the annual Australian Linux conference actually in Australia.

It was held in Dunedin last year, which was very convenient for us, but Susanne was a bit disappointed when I asked her to come to an Australian conference, then told her it was being held in New Zealand. This year however, she is very happy! And looking forward to the Partners Programme which looks pretty good.

I've got a fairly good idea of what talks I'll attend, and will be at the GPG KeySigning (as will Susanne) and will also do a bit of CAcert assuring as well.

Anyhow, back to the preparations.

After almost 3 years we (along with NZRS) have made another open source release of the software which runs the .nz domain name system. Head over to DNRS on SourceForge to check it out.

There is a slew of improvements from the previous release (as to be expected), so we hope that people will pick it up and get involved with it. Interestingly enough there were 800 downloads of the previous version (only 500 odd downloads of all the required components though).

Well, a bunch of people were quite interested in the news that Apple have released a CalDAV server under an open source license, myself included. It is available from the CalendarServer project webpage.

They state that they've only tested it under MacOS X. Which as I 've tried to compile it under Linux certainly shows!

I've managed to fight through the various bits and pieces and managed to get it to run! <phew>

Here are a few notes regarding my experience, some steps and packages might be missing. These are directly related to Debian Unstable.

Required Debian packages:

• python2.4-dev
  
• libkrb5-dev
  
• attr (and make sure that partition is mounted with the option user_xattr, as mentioned in to the comments you can also run `mount -oremount,user_xattr <mount point>`)
  

You need to build the Python xattr package, by running (somewhere handy) the following. You may not need to actually checkout the code first. I had to do this as it wasn't automatically checked out for me. Of course, YMMV.


svn checkout http://svn.red-bean.com/bob/xattr/trunk/ xattr
<become root>
cd xattr
export C_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/include/python2.4
python setup.py install


The Python module plistlib.py to read MacOS X PList files is required, it is available from SVN. I copied it into /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages on my machine and it was picked up.

Some of the packages which are checked out from SVN require some patches applied to them. The patches are:

• Twisted
  
• PyKerberos - Also the patches from trac might be useful. Don't worry about the includes one that is on trac, my supplied patch over rides that.
  

PyKerberos will need to be patched before it will compile, Twisted will compile but will do the wrong things with the extended attributes until is is patched. Then just re-running "run" from inside the CalendarServer directory should pick up the change.

I found the method that worked reasonably well was run "run -s" as provided by CalendarServer and whenever it broke (after checking out the required packages) apply the patch that I've provided, then run "run -s" again.

Update: Added details about plistlib.py and alternative to mounting the filesystem. Thanks Andrew M.
Update 2: Add fact that xattr wasn't automatically downloaded for me.
Update 3: The PyKerberos patch should now continue to work for MacOS X folks, and added details about the patches from Trac.