Embeded Debian questions

Being in the process of compiling a diminutive Debian GNU/Linux -based OS image to boot an embeded device, I ran into a few problems that, I would guess, have already been resolved by other Debian developers working in the embeded device industry. My main questions are:

Obsolete (c)deboostrap package list for Etch

I notice that debootstrap's idea of which packages to install has never been updated for Etch, which currently installs pretty much the same packages as Sarge. One exemple is fetching dhcp-client instead of dhcp3-client.

Would anyone have an updated package bootstraping list for Etch?

Overcoming the footprint of a default Debian install with Busybox

Reading its documentation, it appears that Busybox can effectively replace about 80% of the packages rated with a priority Standard or higher. However, since neither busybox or busybox-static offer any Provides line, it becomes fairly difficult to figure out which packages can be safely removed without hosing the system.

Would anybody happen to have more details about exactly which packages Busybox can replace while still providing just enough functionality to boot a Debian-based system up to an X display manager? This equivalence list would need to be up-to-date with the Etch bootstrap requirements mentioned in the previous question.

Having clear answers to the above two question would go a long way towards helping me get started on this project. Thanks in advance to anyone who can provide relevant answers!

Kotoisuus workgroup publishes new Finnish keyboard map

Via Michael Kaplan:

I was talking with someone the other day who is working on/with the new Finnish keyboard standard. [PDF in English]

Kyllä vain, suomalaisilla on sittenkin uutta näppäimistön oletusasettelua!

The novelty is the integration of several new deadkeys, accessible via AltGr or Shift+AltGr, that enable the composition of accented characters needed for the minority languages of Scandinavia, such as Faroese and Samé, and for those of significant immigrant groups such as Turkish and Vietnamese. Then the caron, macron and ogonek open the door to Baltic languages, while the double-accute allows writing Hungarian using a normal Finnish keyboard.

Ihanat painomerkit! Lisää! Laitetaanko saman tien consolelle ja X:lle kaikki näppäimistön oletusasettelut uusiksi?

Now, if they could only get around integrating the Russian ЯВЕРТЫ keymap on top of that, I would be such a happy boy...

PS: this post is dedicated to another Kaplan, Mr.RTL himself, Lior Kaplan, for officially becoming a DD. Congratulations!

Buzzword opportunism won't do

Being involved in no less than four different projects, all with excellent prospects for a permanent job, reminds me of why riding the Free Software bandwagon as yet another opportunistic buzzword won't do:

In three of the projects, people insist upon communicating using the closed source VoIP application Skype. There indeed is a crude port for Linux on i386 (though not for amd64, powerpc, or any other architecture), but the dependencies are broken and my friends at Skype emphasize that Linux is a non-market for them, so I should not expect any solution any time soon. Still, the people behind some of these projects regularly threaten that I'm wasting their time by "refusing" to install Skype on my computer.

Free Software promoters who don't understand what "non-free" means.

In two of the projects, the corporate homepage is made as a single Flash animation. Mentioning that Flash support is extremely broken and thus essentially non-existent on Free Software platforms is pointless: the people behind the project are Windows users and yet they insist that their project is about promoting the free circulation of ideas using Free Software.

Free Software promoters who don't understand interoperability.

In one particular project, the product follows the Googlesque model of "the Web as my application and file server". Great idea, except that ―­ once again ― the people behind the project are Windows users and they insist that the Thin Client hardware must have a standard set of applications pre-installed and some storage media, thus defeating the purpose of this business model.

Promoters of "the Web as my application and file server" model who don't understand the implications of a Thin Client solution.

In all cases, the people behind the project mean well, but ― not being Free Software users themselves ― they clearly don't understand the profound implications of the Free Software agenda; they only see it as a license-free technology to connect the masses for cheap and they evidently find it difficult to think outside the Windows PC framework.

Free Software as a business model, in a nutshell: data interoperability and the client-server model. Either get it or you're wasting my time ...and yours too. Nothing personal; just business.

PS: I sincerely hope that anybody who recognizes themselves in the above rant will acknowledge my honest concerns and embrace this opportunity to truly adopt Free Software. Just do it! It doesn't matter where you get the FOSS. Just make sure that the FOSS gets you! (inspired by a great Candy Dulfer song currently blasting through the headphones).

mIRC finally supports UTF-8 ... sort-of

A great day for multilingual chatting indeed! Kenneth Falck mentions that mIRC (the de-facto standard IRC client on Microsoft Windows) finally supports incoming UTF-8 encoded messages, starting with version 6.17. Khaled: how about outputting UTF-8 encoded messages too?

Gratuitous plug

People who understand French and who follow EU policy-making issues might find my other blog interesting.

Open Tuesday in Helsinki

Two days ago, I attended the first occurrence of Open Tuesday, an Open Source event building upon the established First Tuesday concept: people from a given industry gather on the first Tuesday of every month for some informal chat and networking. The meeting usually starts with the company that sponsors that particular month's event presenting their latest business concept or product. For Open Tuesday, this means Finnish players in the FOSS industry.

I was particularly pleased with the wide variety of private and public sector representatives that attended this first event and found the exchange of ideas extremely stimulating. The fact that promising job leads also crept into some of the conversations obviously added to my satisfaction as well. Besides, several notorious developers like icon designer Tuomas Kuosmanen and Debian's very own Lars Wirzenius were also spotted among the crowd, which was very nice indeed. Anyhow, if you are working in the Finnish FOSS industry or if your FOSS business often takes you to Helsinki, you could hardly go wrong joining in on the fun. Definitely recommended!

Award to the Debian community of Finland

Open Source 2006 is a one-day seminar that provides Free Software actors of Finland with a forum to present their work and the current trends in Free Software development to a greater audience comprised mainly of decision-makers from the business and governmental sectors.

Finnish Open Office localization team

This year, a noticeable trend were governmental cases of transition to Open Office and other Free Software solutions on the municipal desktop. Thus, it was only fitting that Finnish localization took greater importance than before and, in concordance, that this year's Linux-tekijä award went to the Finnish Open Office localization team. The jury invited 3 people from the localization team to receive the award on their team's behalf:

• Pastor Asmo Koskinen of the bilingual Finnish-Swedish parish of Kokkola; an active promoter of Open Office in the Finnish public sector that has given many training sessions on Open Office and helped countless end-users transition to Open Office.
• Translator Marko Grönroos; a leading Finnish localizer that is involved in the localization of an impressive number of Free Software products.
• Language Technology Expert Harri Pitkänen; the initiator of the Hunspell adaptation for the Finnish language.

Pastor Koskinen also gave a very stimulating lecture on the collaborative effort behind the localization, mentioning in passing that Czech Pavel Jani­k also plays an important role in building the Open Office binaries for a number of Baltic and Scandinavian languages.

Debian community of Finland

The jury also granted an honorary mention to the Debian community of Finland to acknowledge years of achievements, reaching an important milestone in 2005 when Finland hosted the yearly Debian Conference. Another motivation was a number of nominations for Ubuntu, both as a distribution and for its extremely active local user community. Given how a majority of Ubuntu developers actually are Debian Developers, the jury unanimously decided to honor them collectively from the perspective of Debian and its derivatives. The jury invited 3 people to receive the honorary mention on the community's behalf:

• Inquisitor Lars Wirzenius needs no introduction; an early adopter and promoter of Debian in Finland, his strong voice has eloquently sung the merits of Debian and Free Software to large audiences and persuaded a significant number of Finns to join the Debian project.
• Educator and Translator Tapio Lehtonen; appearing himself among this year's nominations for his extremely friendly attitude towards people making their first steps as a Free Software user, he is mainly known for localizing the Debian installation software.
• Event organizer Aschwin van der Woude (represented in absentee by co-organizer Fabian Fagerholm); personally initiated countless Free Software promoting events and developer workshops throughout Finland, culminating in 2005 with the important responsibility for Debconf5's budget and legal matters.

Lars gave the audience a very interesting perspective of his long involvement with Debian, while Tapio emphasized particular pride in seeing non-programmers that maintain documentation or localize software be acknowledged. Fabian gave a very emotional speech in which he praised the commendable efforts of dozens of volunteer DebConf5 organizers that discretely handled unpleasant tasks that were nonetheless essential to the success of the event.

The Jury

Yours truly was invited to join the jury on behalf of Linux Aktivaattori, alongside representatives from the academic, business and Free Software communities. During the prize ceremony, FLUG chairman Arto Teräs and myself took turns at describing the award's selection process and at introducing the winners.

Good news for those who care about Debian

Via Hector:

Debian, Ubuntu and DCCA joint efforts for improving laptop support and for Linux kernel and X11 packaging on Debian -derivative software distributions.

This kind of group effort is precisely what makes the Free Software development model so great and, as this story demonstrates eloquently, it applies remarkably well to corporate software development, even among vendors that are competing for the same market segment. Awesome, isn't it?

Eesti keele spelleri arendus [2]

The publication of an article by Elver, about my packages of ispell-et on Minut.ee (the Estonian Slashdot) produced an interesting thread:

• Several people complaining how Estonians are so selfish and undedicated that it took a foreigner to package it,
• Others praising me for packaging it,
• Someone noticing that the last upstream release dates back from 2003 and wondering how to help develop the actual wordlist content,
• Someone else persistently asking how to get Estonian spellchecking working in Thunderbird,
• Someone else asking if it's possible to test this on Windows, (Täh?!)

...with myself personally replying to some of the posts in the thread.

E-stonia

If these two links [1] [2] don't manage to convince you that Estonia is the place to be if you're really serious about innovating in the ICT sector, then I really don't know what will.

Eesti keele spelleri arendus

As I mentioned in a previous post, I maintain the Debian and Ubuntu package of ispell-et (Estonian dictionaries for the Aspell, Ispell and MySpell spell checkers - plus an hyphenation pattern for OpenOffice). Packaging this software was a natural choice for someone like me who is learning the language and who needs something to highlight obvious mistakes.

This being said, the Estonian wordlists that serve as raw material to generate those dictionaries are in desperate need of Language Love; the vocabulary appears frozen in Soviet time and rather incomplete to begin with: obsolete words nobody can even remember (probably of importance only to linguists or philologists), omission of even the most basic colloquial slangs, complete absence of contemporary technical vocabulary, etc.

Therefore, I am hereby inviting all Estonians to contribute to the development of the wordlist. The procedure is fairly simple: install the Estonian dictionary package for your favorite text editor or word processor (on Ubuntu 6.04, simply install language-support-et), load a few documents and report all words that were mistakenly marked as misspelled to Jaak Pruulmann. As an incentive, please note that all improvements will go into the Estonian version of Edubuntu, providing free language learning tools to Estonian children and thus benefiting the entire Estonian community. Tore homma, eks ole? :-)

Unicode migration issues for ru_RU locale

My co-pilot for the rus-ispell maintenance, Антон Марчуков (whom some of you might remember from Debconf5), has setup a Wiki for cataloging issues preventing the migration to UTF-8 locales for Russian [in Russian] and other languages that utilize the Cyrillic script. If you need proper Cyrillic support for your FOSS desktop and have any issue to report, please visit the Wiki and contribute. Do the same and let us know if you have contributed a patch that fixes an UTF-8 issue for any application. Добро пожаловать!

Tales of positive upstream collaboration

Amaya talks about a case where an upstream developer contributed a patch to the Debian package of his software. I'll take this opportunity to mention a couple of positive experiences of my own:

• CUPS-PDF is a CUPS backend to generate PDF documents instead of printing out hard copies. Given my complete ignorance of CUPS internals, I figured that I would kindly ask upstream to subscribe himself to the PTS, just in case an RC bug would rear its ugly head.

  Volker immediately agreed and, sure enough, someone filed a number of RC bugs resulting from an audit they had performed. Volker replied and argued every point with the submitter by himself, then promptly released a new tarball which included all the fixes.

  This is the best case of collaborative maintenance I've encountered so far: Volker maintains his code and I maintain the Debian package. Everybody wins.

• Ispell-et is an Estonian wordlist from which all 3 dictionary variants (aspell, ispell, myspell) are generated, plus an hyphenation pattern for OpenOffice, which upstream also uses to generate compound words.

  Jaak is a linguistic technology developer whose extremely busy schedule leaves very little time for hobbies. However, the appearance of my package in the Debian repository renewed his interest in maintaining his wordlist. He promptly reviewed my package and suggested a couple of fixes to improve the quality of the dictionary generation process. He also proposed further improvements to eventually generate Hunspell dictionaries as well. Once again, everybody wins.

Wouldn't it be great if all upstream developers subscribed to the Debian PTS for their software and answered bugs related to the codebase themselves?

New Blogation

Elver convinced me to start blogging again. This time, instead of bothering with setting up my own blog engine, I decided to go back and try Blogger again.

Hacking the CSS template to match my regular website took even less time than I expected. Elver took the opportunity to ask his pal X-G for a second opinion on the current template. The result is what you see.

Here I go again, blogging in excess. A new blogation.