RESEARCHUT

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.

**http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=proprietary%20medicine &ia=ahsmd

proprietary medicine ** _n. _
 A medicinal compound whose formula and often mode of manufacture are owned by an individual or a corporation under a trademark or patent. 

The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary
Copyright (C) 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

This is a topic which has gotten me wondering about what the practices are, that governments in different regions follow. And on what grounds.

I recently acquired a [Lenovo Yoga 2 13](http://www.cnet.com/products/lenovo- yoga-2-13-inch/). While, at the time, the Yoga 3 was available, I decided to go for Yoga 2 13. The Yoga 3 comes with the newer Core M Broadwell family, which, in my opinion, [doesn’t really bring any astounding benefits](http://www.digitalversus.com/laptop/lenovo-ideapad- yoga-2-13-3-p18512/test.html).

The Yoga 2 13 comes in mulitple variants worldwide. Infact these hardware variations have different effets when run under Linux.

My varaint of Yoga 2 13 is:

Another of my articles for self. Writing it down on the website is much better than pushing it on a 3rd party social site. Your data is yours.

My site runs on Drupal. Given I’m not a web designer, it is not my core area. Thus I’ve always wanted to have minimal engagement with it. My practices have paid me well so far. And I should thank all the free tools that help do that. I like to keep a running snapshot of my website on my local laptop, to keep it handy when trying anything new. This means that the setup has to be almost identical to what is running remotely.

This article is for self, so that I don’t again forget the specifics. The last time I did the same setup, it wasn’t very important in terms of security. gitolite(3) + gitweb can give an impressive git tool with very simple user acls. After you setup gitolite, ensure that the umask value in gitolite is approriate, i.e. the gitolite group has r-x privilege. This is needed for the web view. Add your apache user to the gitolite group. With the umask changes, and the group association, apache’s user will now be able to read gitolite repos.

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.

Looking at the PTS entries, I realized that it has been more than 2 yrs, since I pushed the first Apport packages into Debian.

We have talked about it [in the past](http://www.researchut.com/blog/report- bugs-with-apport-3), and do not see a direct need for apport yet. That is one reason why it still resides (and will continue to) in Experimental.

Even though not used as a bug reporting tool, Apport can still be a great tool for (end) users to detect crashes. It can also be used to find further details about program crashes and pointers to look further.