La Salle Debain

This is the latest upstream version and will, barring any unforseen circumstances, be the version in wheezy, the upcoming stable release of Debian GNU/Linux. In order to ensure it is the high quality our users have come to expect from Debian stable, I need your help.

First and foremost, please test the hell out of it. Upgrades during a stable release are in general not allowed unless the problem is security related so we need to shake all the bugs out now. I am particularly interested in knowing if there are any issues with upgrades from squeeze.

I waved my hands ineffectually at the bug list but it needs more attention. Could some kind person go through them and let me know which ones are no longer valid, need further attention etc.?

I attempted to add hardening flags but lintian still complains a lot. I think the warnings are probably false positives but I'm not a 100% sure so I would appreciate some advice from those who know more about such things.

Those are the issues that come to mind at the moment but feel free to let me know if there's something I've missed.

By incredible coincidence, Dick Cheney, Dr. Who, and Devin Townsend were in L.A. that very day.

By now hopefully you got a chance to see my Jeopardy! episode so it won't be much of a spoiler to mention that I didn't win.

It went like this. I flew into LA on the night of October 31st. The taping was to take place on the next two days. Jeopardy! tapes two weeks of shows, two days a week for a total of 10 episodes. Contestants are randomly chosen for one of those 10 episodes but you don't find out which one you will be on until the last minute. Randomness and secrecy have become become a big part of the production process in games since the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. (Interesting fact: it is a Federal felony to tamper with a TV game show.)

There were a group of just under 20 0f us altogether waiting to go on. All very nice people. Here in the New York area one tends to equate very intelligent people with "Type A" personalities but we got on well together.

Interspersed between the tapings, we had short practice sessions to familiarize ourselves with the studio setup and this is where I first started getting a little apprehensive. Jeopardy! is not just about general knowledge, there is a physical element too in that you have to buzz in by pressing a button on a stick which is wired up to some producers console. You can't buzz in before Alex has finished reading the question and obviously you can't buzz in if someone is already answering the question. If you buzz at the wrong time, your buzzer locks for 0.75 seconds so just jamming your finger on the button. I didn't even get that far as on the entire first day I failed to buzz in at all despite changing hands, changing grip different ways and other strategies. I was pretty despondent by the second day but then miraculously I managed to get the hang of it. So when I was finally selected (for the 3rd game of that day.) I was back to my usual cool self. I was up against Dave Leach and Nicholas Campiz who were returning after having tied in the previous game.

And the game did start well enough. Oh one thing you may notice is that Alex mispronounces my name Jaldhal. I knew he did that once or twice and even mentioned it to a producer but it was only viewing the episode right now that I see he does it consistently. I assumed such things would be fixed up in post-editting but I guess not. Oh well, after living in this country for so many years I've learned to be happy whenever two consonants are more or less in the right place. This particular mispronunciation is actually fairly common, even Indian people have been known to make it. The alternative theory is that Alex couldn't read my horrible handwriting which is also plausible.

Anyway, I digress. I started off fairly well. My first mistake was in a category about alcoholic drinks. I answered vermouth when the correct response was gin. In my defense I'm a strict teetoler so none of these words mean anything to me. I also earned the disapproval of my superhero fan son by mistaking Dr. Strange for Dr. Doom. I did get the one about Spiderman villain Dr. Octopus so that mollified him somewhat.

The highlight of my evening was strangely enough in a category about books of the Bible. I got a Daily Double. It was a risky move but I have always wanted to make a "true" daily double so I threw caution to the winds and wagered everything I had. To my surprise as much as anyones, got the answer right doubling my score.

I was in a pretty good position for the Double Jeopardy but thats when Dave started dominating. If you haven't been watching previous games, Dave Leach is arguably the best player this season. Not only is he smart but he is almost supernaturally fast on the buzzer. You can't see because I kept my hands behind the podium but I again and again I would desperately try to ring in on a question I knew the answer to only to be beaten to the punch by Dave. This caused me to start getting a bit reckless and answering questions where I was less than certain which cost me dearly. One particularly dumb mistake was in a category where all the answers were supposed to start with the letter g. I said compass when I should said gyrocompass but actually I should have left that category alone entirely.

By the time Final Jeopardy came around winning was no longer an option as Dave was too far in the lead. I was slightly ahead of Nicholas in 2nd place. This is where I again made a strategic error. My original plan to bet nothing in Final Jeopardy but the category was "1930s Novels" and I liked my chances. The clue was read out and it involved an anti-war novel whose author was blacklisted. I was elated. It had to be "All Quiet on the Western Front" right? The blacklist bit gave me pause as the author Erich Maria Remarque was German and this was obviously a reference to the anti-Communist blacklist in the 1950s USA. But somehow I remembered that he had spent the end of his life in Hollywood or maybe I just convinced myself that it was plausible. Evidently my thought process wasn't too crazy because all three of us came up with the same answer. All three of us were wrong. The correct answer was "Johnny Got His Gun" by Daltan Trumbo. In hindsight I knew this but it illustrates the strange ways the mind works. I knew because the video for Metallicas song "One" from "...And Justice for All" is based on the film adaptation of this book. However in a previous orientation session the lady who is the contestant coordinator for Jeopardy! had mentioned AQOTHWF as anexample of something and this got stuck in my brain crowding out the previously known fact.

So when all was said and done I ended up in 3rd place. (I bet big whereas Nicholas was more conservative.) Oh well. Despite not winning I had a blast. I fulfilled my dream of appearing on Jeopardy! I met Alex Trebek. (And I should be receiving an autographed picture of us together soon.) My witty banter was sufficiently witty. I made enough money to cover my travel expenses and still have a nice amount left. And I got to meet lots of interesting and wonderful people. So I'm satisfied.

Some time ago, I mentioned auditioning for Jeopardy!, Americas top TV quiz show. I didn't hear back from the producers for quite a while so I assumed I hadn't been selected but then suddenly one day in October I got a call inviting me to come out to Sony Studios in Culver City California for a taping in November. I went and it is finally airing now. So if you are in the US or Canada (the show is possibly syndicated elsewhere but I'm not sure) please be sure to watch me on Wednesday, January the 4th. I won't say how well I did until afterwards but I was quite pleased with my performance.

Wishing the entire Debian community worldwide a happy and prosperous Gujarati New Year (Vikram Samvat 2068 called Shobhan.)

The picture above, is one that's been making the rounds of the Indian blogosphere. It purports to be a NASA satellite image of India on Diwali (which was last night.) Actually it is a composite of several night shots taken over a period of a few years. Also the red dots are people who have been injured by fireworks and the green dots those immobilized by the ingestion of too much baraphi and halwa. But I could be wrong about that.

I've had some terrific news these past few days but alas I'm not at liberty to divulge it just yet...

As many people reading this may know, my wife Jyoti was in the World Trade Center on 9/11. When the first plane hit, she joined some colleagues at her employers offices on the 78th floor of the South Tower to see what was going on. A few minutes later she went downstairs to her desk on the 77th floor to call me and tell me about it. That's when the second plane hit. Everyone on the 78th floor was instantly killed as she would have been if she had decided to stay. She and some friends, covered in debris and soaked in jet fuel, blinded by thick black smoke made their way down 77 flights of stairs (the elevators were out of action) and even though she was seven months pregnant with our daughter at the time she went all the way down without stopping to rest. An NYPD officer Ramon Suarez helped her out and to an ambulance. He went back to rescue others and died half an hour later when the North Tower collapsed.

I was at home. After getting ready and saying my morning prayers, I was leisurly preparing breakfast before starting the day. I started getting phone calls asking "Is Jyoti ok?" Of course she was. Why wouldn't she be? I somehow don't remember who said it first but I was told to turn on the TV because a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I spent the rest of the morning glued to the screen in horror as information on what exactly had happened. Absolutely the lowest moment of my life was when I saw, in real time, the twin towers fall. It was several more hours before I actually got to talk to Jyoti on the phone, confirmation that she was still alive. I didn't get to actually see her and hold her until the next day owing to the curfew around Manhattan.

So that's what happened that day. We have repeatedly been told "Never forget" but truth be told some of the details are already fading from my memory. For my wife too, while she occasionally had panic attacks at first, every day life is foremost now and it is only on days like this that her ordeal comes to mind. Our daughter Shailaja is now 10 years old and an honor roll student who just started 4th grade. She knows the story but is not affected by it. These are good things in my opinion. What the jihadists want most of all is apocalypse. They wanted the world to change course but ten years later America remains as generous, bull-headed, lively, spiritual, garish and crude as ever. That's the sweetest revenge lovers of life can have. Don't give up your rights and your daily routines to fear but make the bastards give up theirs. Or as the cliche goes, the terrorists will win.

Members of the public are advised not to panic at this time.

Wondering what is going on with the port of Debian to the Minix 3 microkernal? Here's an update.

dpkg Ported

Well, the big news as I mentioned in my last post is that dpkg has been successfully ported. I haven't sent the patches to the maintainers just yet as they need review and clean up but I will do that ASAP. The architecture name is defined as minix_i386. (There is no k because I am using the Minix libc as well as the kernel.) I am currently targetting squeeze.

A Maze of Twisty Dependencies All Different

Armed with my new dpkg, I have begun building packages which has been an interesting experience. The Debian packaging systems greatest asset — dependencies — is also its most frustrating during initial bootstrapping. Take debhelper for instance; nowadays most packages depend on it and I personally wouldn't think of creating a .deb without it but it build-depends e.g. po4a which build-depends on...debhelper. Also some programs which are assumed to be present on linux such as ldconfig are simply not available on Minix. So currently theres a lot of dpkg --force-depends and even --force-all going on. Of course this is only a temporary problem until I get a full set of base packages built. The equivs package is coming in handy too. In lieu of working .debs, I have been using Minix native packages to fill in the gaps. They use NetBSD pkgsrc which is a new experience for me. I can't say I'm that impressed but they work and, being uptodate, are a good source of patches.

Works in Progress

The two big packages I need to work on next are perl 5.10.1 and gcc 4.4.5. I haven't touched the latter yet. Perl is failing in its second-stage bootstrap for reasons I haven't gotten to the bottom of just yet. I suspect it has more to do with deficiencies in my build environment than a problem in perl itself.

libc Deficiencies

As I mentioned last time, the situation has improved tremendously since Minix switched over to using the NetBSD libc but I am still running into problems with unimplemented APIs. Take getpwent(3) and getpwuid(3) for instance. Being able to map between user ids and names is kind of important you know? Even worse instead of being completely absent some of these exist as stubs. So they compile and link without warning but always return ENOFILE and so on. I was surprised to find that there is no standardized API for getting information on mounted filesystems. (Which e.g. df(1) needs.) Linux uses getmnt(3) similar but incompatible with System V. The BSDs use getmntinfo so probably this is what Minix will implement. GNU programs are good about portability but a lot of Free software is unfortunately Linux-centric. Hopefully the Debian FreeBSD port already has patches for these cases. There are several annoyances like this but I suppose I shouldn't complain too much. I am using an unreleased version of Minix which is under heavy development and I must say the upstream developers have been good about responding to my concerns.

Looking forward: fakeroot, grub2, ext2

fakeroot is a very handy development tool that frees a developer from having to create .debs as root. Alas it won't work under Minix as it depends on LD_PRELOAD and Minix doesn't even support shared libraries. fakeroot-ng sounds a bit more promising as it uses the ptrace(2) system call which is implemented in the Minix kernel though I don't know how well.

Minix is now multiboot compliant so it is possible to use grub2 instead of the Minix boot loader. Definitely something I'm going to look at soon.

Minix now supports ext2 (though not ext3 or ext4) in addition to its native file system. For compatability this should become the default in the Debian port. While the kernel support is part of the standard Minix system, the userland support (e2fsprogs) is not for some reason. So I'll have to see about porting that.

Can I Help the Porting Effort?

Sorry not yet. Though if you are determined I'll try and help you get set up. Hopefully in a month or less I will be able to distribute a pre-alpha version so I suggest waiting for that. I am definitely going to be looking for outside help.