Debian-Blog

Hello World,

In this part of the world, today is a great day. Today is Diwali - the festival of lights

On this day, I am very happy to announce the release of apt-offline , version 1.7. This release brings in a large number of fixes and is a recommended update. Thanks to Bernd Dietzel for uncovering the shell injection bug which could be exploited by carefully crafting the signature file. Since apt-offline could be run as ‘root’, this one was an important bug. Also thanks to him for the fix.

Post iPhone launch, in this new age, it is common to carry a device capable of capturing high definition images and videos. Most people today carry a high end device capable of capturing video/audio, in the form of a Mobile Phone. This has made us raise our expectation that we should capture most moments, if not all.

But as is with everything, sometimes things ditch you right at the moment when you did not want it to. In new age phones, scenarios usually are: you capturing a video and the actual data not written to the disk (battery drain, cpu overheat, software bug: Whatever). Such was my case from the year 2012, where one of the videos was corrupt. Corrupt as in, A/V not in sync.

For some time, I have been wanting to read more on Linux Cgroups to explore possibilities of using it to control Ill behaving applications. At this time, while I’m stuck in travel, it has given me some time to look into it.

In our Free Software world, most of the things are do-o-cracy, i.e. when your use case is not the common one, it is typically you who has to explore possible solutions. It could be Bugs , Feature Requests or as is in my case, performance issues. But that is not to assume that we do not have better quality software in Free Software world. Infact, in my opinion, some of the tools available are far much more better than the competition in terms of features, and to add a sweetener (or nutritional facts) to it is the fact that Free Software liberates the user.

I am please to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools 1.68.1.

The last release (1.68) was mostly about systemd integration, and so is this release. There were a couple of bugs reported, and most of them fixed, with this release. All downstreams are requested to upgrade.

For RPM packages for Fedora and OpenSUSE (Tumbleweed), please see the homepage.

1.68.1 - Sun Sep 27 14:00:13 IST 2015

    * Update details about runtime-pm in manpage

    * Revert "Drop out reload"

    * Log error more descriptively

    * Write to common stderr. Do not hardcode a specific one

    * Call lmt-udev in lmt-poll. Don't call the laptop_mode binary directly.

      Helps in a lot of housekeeping

    * Direct stderr/stdout to journal

    * Fix stdout descriptor

    * Install the new .timer and poll service

    * Use _sbindir for RPM

So I got an email yesterday from Google’s Jess Hemerly, talking about how they care about encryption

To quote a small snippet of the email:

We use locks to keep our homes and our possessions safe offline. But how can we protect our digital things, like photos on a smartphone or email traveling across the web?  **[The answer is encryption.](https://takeaction.withgoogle.com/page/m/1439db80/19cdc98/22666ed/3ed584ff/875135400/VEsE/ "http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efacebook%2Ecom%2FGoogleTakeAction%2Fvideos%2Fvb%2E924932914232399%2F939211039471253%2F&utm_medium=email&utm_source=google&utm_content=2+-+The+answer+is+encryption&utm_campaign=20150910encryption1pm&source=20150910encryption1pm")**

To change, it has to start from home. That means, add encryption support to Gmail. Add encryption to Google Photos. To every service you provide. So that, if tomorrow, your service is compromised, you don’t public our data.

I am please to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.68.

This release is mainly focused on integration with the newer init system, systemd. Without the help from the awesome Debian systemd maintainers, this would not have been possible. Thank you folks.

While the focus now is on systemd, LMT will still support the older SysV Init.

With this new release, there are some new files: laptop-mode.service, laptop- mode.timer and lmt-poll.service. All the files should be documented well enough for users. lmt-poll.service is the equivalent of the module battery- level-polling , should you need it.

A couple of us DDs met here on the weekend. It is always a fun time, being part of these meetings. We talked briefly about the status of Cross Compilation in Debian, on the tools that simplify the process.

Next we touched upon licensing, discussing the benefits of particular licenses (BSD, Apache, GPL) from the point of view of the consumer. The consumer being an individual just wanting to use/improve software, to a consumer who’s building a (free / non-free) product on top of it. I think the overall conclusion was that there are 2 major licenses at a high level: Ones those allow you take the code and not give back, and the others which allow you to take code only if you are ready to share the enhancements back and forward.

We just pushed VirtualBox 5.0.0 into Debian Experimental. It should land up on your mirrors very soon.

Since this is a major release, we are looking for some testing and feedback. If you use VBox, or have your business depend on it, please give it a test. For details about what is new in 5.x, please check out the [release announcement](http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-vm- virtualbox-5-070915.html)

For this year’s Google Summer of Code, I have been mentoring Yuru Roy Shao, on Integrating Apport with Debian. Yuru is a CS student studying at University of Michigan, USA completing his PhD.

For around 2+ years, Apport was packaged for Debian, but remained in Experimental. While we did have a separate (Debian BTS aware) crashdb, the general concerns (bug spam, too many duplicates etc) were the reason we held its inclusion.

I am pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.67.

This release has many important bug fixes, and everyone is recommended to upgrade. Of the many, one important fix is to, more reliably check for Device Mapper based devices, which is common these days with Crypt and LVM.

For the summary of changes to quote from git log:

1.67 - Thu Jul  2 17:05:07 IST 2015
    * Relax minimum window size to accomodate low res screens
    * Fix variable name to comply with our "constants" assuptions
    * Get more aggressive in power saving for Intel HD Audio
    * Account Device Mapper devices
    * Add swsusp freeze support
    * Switch battery-level-polling default to True
    * Detect ethernet carrier, early and relibaly
    * changes the boolean setting *_ACTIVATE_SATA_POWER to a customizable
      *_SATA_POLICY, with backward-compatible defaults and documentation
      Thanks Yuir D'Elia

PS: On a side note, over the years, Linux’s power savings functionality has improved a lot, all thanks to its use in the mobile worlds. At the same time, because of more companies shipping drivers depending on external firmware, stability has become less reliable. And to add to that, bare functionality of devices typically ask for disabling, you know what, LPM.