The Debian/Ubuntu Games Team is organizing another meeting. If you’re into developing and/or packaging of games, or just generally curious about games in Debian/Ubuntu, you should join!

It will be held next Saturday, the 26th of November, in the #debian-games channel on irc.debian.org (also know as irc.oftc.net) at 10:00 UTC. More information is available on the wiki page Games/Meetings/2011-11-26.

The agenda starts off with the usual round of introductions, so if you’re new to the Team, say hi! Then we’ll be going through the action items from the last meeting, including work on the Debian Games LiveCD, and what’s up with the /usr/games/ path anyways?

Next we’ll be moving onto how the Games Team is faring in terms of members: are new recruits finding it comfortable, should we advertise more?

Next up it’s the squeeky penguin: Wheezy is somewhere in the not-completely-distant future, how does that affect the Games Team, should we be scuffling to get specific tasks done?

Then onto the recurring question of Sponsoring, and how to improve it, should we be utilising DebExpo more? What about our favourite PET?

Lastly, PlayDeb is doing some really neat stuff, would it make sense for our team to push some changes to PlayDeb? Would it make sense for PlayDeb to push changes to Debian Games?

Hopes are for a good discussion, and a merry time, hope to see you all there!

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Balsamiq source XML

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1. Installing CAFF (CA – Fire and Forget)

Easy.

sudo aptitude install signing-party

2. Configuring CAFF

For this we open up ~/.caffrc and write in something like this:

$CONFIG{'owner'} = 'Siegfried Gevatter';
$CONFIG{'email'} = 'name@example.com';
$CONFIG{'keyid'} = [ qw{1CFC22F3363DEAE3} ];
$CONFIG{'gpg-sign-args'} = 'save';

The last line avoids the default behavior of dropping you into an interactive gpg session for each key, and just signs all IDs automatically after asked for confirmation. I’ve also set the trust level to 2 (“I have checked this key casually.“) by creating a ~/.caff/gnupghome/gpg.conf file with:

personal-digest-preferences SHA256
cert-digest-algo SHA256
default-cert-level 2

To further streamline the process, I’ve defined an alias in my ~./.bashrc so that CAFF won’t ask for confirmation for every single e-mail it sends:

alias caff="caff -m yes"

3. Installing and configuring sSMTP

Now so that CAFF can send out the mails, we need a mail agent. If you don’t have one already, you’ll need to install one and configure it to work with your e-mail setup (in my case, Gmail). I decided to go with sSMTP, but you can use any other MTA of your choice.

I followed those instructions to configure it:  Send Mail with Gmail and sSMTP. Additionally, I changed the permissions of the /etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf file to 640 (-rw-r—–) and the owner to root.rainct (where rainct is my username) so that the plain-text password in it is protected.

4. Using CAFF

That’s it. Well, at least for the setup part, now the real work begins, verifying and signing all the keys. In my case I had them printed out on paper and just typed “caff <id1> <id2> <…>” (eg. “caff 363DEAE3“). CAFF then downloads the keys, asks for confirmation for each of them so you can double-check, and finally e-mails the signatures to everyone.

By the way, in case you accidentally sign the wrong key (eg. one you had on your list but whose owner you didn’t met), you can still revoke your signature (see this “Help revoking a signature” mailing list post).

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© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2010. | Permalink | License | Post tags: Debian, events, Ubuntu

I think the time has come that I make a confession. You may be wondering why I haven’t spent much time with you those last months, and you have the right to know. The case is, I have another one. She’s called Debian.

No, it’s not because of you. It’s also not because of your parents; while they aren’t perfect, they are great in many ways and I certainly don’t want to run away from then. Just wait and let me explain this. You surely remember that I spent a week with her some time ago? Well, now that I want to join Debian’s family, I decided that after all that wasn’t much time to get to know here, so I gave her another chance, and with this second experience I fell in love with her unstable character. Ubuntu, you are really extraordinary, and I’m still telling anyone who wants to listen about your wonders, but you just can’t appease my desire for trying out new things as well as Debian does.

Now, this doesn’t mean we won’t see each other anymore. I’ll still take you with me whenever I travel, and I’ll continue helping you with the household. In fact, all this wouldn’t signify a big change at all, if it wasn’t that at the same time I also decided to refocus most of my efforts on raising children, which is what really reduced the time I spent helping you.

So, while currently I’m not seeing you as much as before, I hope you all the best, and I’ll still try to help you advance, be it indirectly (1, 2) or, while probably to a lesser degree, continuing with direct contributions.

By the way, hello Planet Debian!

8 comments
© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2010. | Permalink | License | Post tags: Debian, Programari lliure, Ubuntu

While several sources have already propagated the good news, what doesn’t seem to be so widely known is how easy it is to get the Activity Journal running on Ubuntu. Because it is!

Installation on Ubuntu Karmic or Lucid

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zeitgeist/ppa
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install gnome-activity-journal

Now go to Applications -> Utility -> Activity Journal and enjoy the sweetness!

Installation on other systems

Our Personal Package Archive also has packages for Ubuntu Jaunty which you can add the usual way (by adding it to System -> Administration -> Software Sources or editing your sources.list), and the same packages as for Ubuntu work for Debian Sid (to which Zeitgeist 0.3.2 and the GNOME Activity Journal will be uploaded shortly).

There may be packages for other distributions available; if you can’t find any for yours, you can do the installation by hand:

[For Zeitgeist] – Build dependencies: intltool

$ wget http://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/0.3/0.3.2/+download/zeitgeist-0.3.2.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf zeitgeist-0.3.2.tar.gz
$ cd zeitgeist-0.3.2
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install

[For the GNOME Activity Journal] – Build dependencies: Python (2.5+), Python-DistUtils-Extra, intltool

$ wget http://launchpad.net/gnome-activity-journal/0.3/0.3.2/+download/gnome-activity-journal-0.3.2.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf gnome-activity-journal-0.3.2.tar.gz
$ cd gnome-activity-journal-0.3.2
$ python setup.py build
# python setup.py install

But, what is the GNOME Activity Journal?

The GNOME Activity Journal is a tool for easily browsing and finding files, contacts and other resources on your computer. Using Zeitgeist, it keeps a chronological journal of your activity and supports tagging and bookmarking (using the new Tracker 0.7) and establishing relationships between resources.

While this first release only supports basic browsing of file activities, the underlying infrastructure can do much more and you can expect the missing functionality to become available in future releases.

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But it’s not to advertise this game that I’m writing about it, but because I want to write down some solution to the “no sound problem” which you’re likely to find if you try it out, and so that I can remember about the fixes in the future. So, here’s the different things you can try; if one of them fails just go to the next one, and let’s hope that at least the last one does the trick!

1. Install the “oss-compat” package.
As easy as that! Although this alone has never fixed the problem with me, it often does together with solution 2 (described just below), and maybe in your case it may be all you’re missing.

2. A bit of command-line magic
The next one, which seems to be the most successful option, is trying to execute the following line before running Enemy Territory:

echo "et.x86 0 0 direct" | sudo tee /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss

If after doing this the sound works, you can make the change permanent by adding that line to your /etc/rc.local/, for example by running:

sudo sed -i "s:^exit 0:echo 'et.x86 0 0 direct' > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss\nexit 0:" /etc/rc.local

3. Let’s call the artillery

Hopefully you’ll be enjoying an Enemy Territory game with the sound of explosions and shots in your ears, but if the previous solutions didn’t do the trick do not despair, there’s still hope. I’ve found a different solution in this thread and it consists in the following:

a) Download this script: wolfsp-sdl-sound.sh (original download link, alternative download link), created by Pyry Haulos.

b) Open it with a text editor and customize it to match your configuration: change the line «GAME_PATH=”/home/games/enemy-territory”» to point to the location of your Enemy Territory installation (most likely «GAME_PATH=”/usr/local/games/enemy-territor”»); in case your directory with the game files isn’t called «enemy-territory» like in the example you’ll also need to adapt the GAME_DIR variable.

c) Save this file somewhere on your computer, make it executable if needed (you can do this by right clicking on it, selecting “Properties” and under the “Permissions” tab of the dialogue that will show up checking the box to allow execution of the file). Done, now whenever you want to run the game just start it by running this file.

I hope this is useful for someone out there :).

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What maybe isn’t that well-known is, where do those images actually come from? Easy: they are all at screenshots.debian.net and applications interested in showing them fetch them from there.

Now, I’m not telling you this because I think it’s soooo interesting, but because I’m seeing lots of packages without screenshots and… you can help create those! So, go look for some of your favourite application missing a screenshot, take a meaningful screenshot of it (in English, using PNG format, etc.) and head over to screenshots.debian.net to upload it :).

The new software centre (which can be tested in Karmic) of course also shows those screenshots, and in a much nicer way (they fade in automatically).

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After searching for a while and trying out some stuff, the solution is easy. Just open file /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and add the following lines:

options snd-pcsp index=-2
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
alias sound-slot-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel model=hp-m4
options snd-hda-intel enable_msi=1


(Before finding the previous solution I tried upgrading ALSA -following this instructions- so I’ve tested this with ALSA 1.0.20, but I guess 1.0.18 should work aswell).

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To achieve this the only thing I had to do is open /etc/fstab and add the following line to it (this works on both Ubuntu Jaunty and Debian Lenny):

none /tmp tmpfs nr_inodes=200k,mode=01777,nosuid,nodev 0 0

(By default, up to half of the RAM is allocated for /tmp; you can override this value adding the «size» option; eg., «size=2G» to give it 2 GB or «size=1G» to give it only one).

Some people advice to do this change in a recovery console, but I did it live from my normal session and it works as well; just don’t forget to apply the change with the following commands if you do it like me:

sudo mv /tmp /tmp-orig; sudo mkdir /tmp; sudo mount /tmp; sudo mv /tmp-orig/* /tmp; sudo mv /tmp-orig/.* /tmp; sudo rmdir /tmp-orig

9 comments
© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2009. | Permalink | License | Post tags: Debian, Ubuntu

So, running Ubuntu from an USB stick (the last file system corruption had taken some files from /sbin with it) I downloaded the first Debian CD and burned it to a CD (actually, first I booted from a Live CD and as I only have one DVD drive put the Debian image on a Pendrive, but it didn’t want to boot from there, so I put Ubuntu on the pendrive instead and burned the Debian CD from there). The installation process is pretty much like that one with Ubuntu’s alternate CD, but curiously in addition to the typical interface it offers a GTK interface of it (which works exactly the same but looks nicer). The only difference I did observe is that Debian doesn’t allow me to choose the Catalan keyboard variant during installation while Ubuntu does, and for some reason Debian took hours to install instead of the half an hour I was expecting (if some debian-installer developer happens to read this, giving some more information during installation on what it’s actually doing would be appreciated).

Once the installation completed Debian Lenny was up and running (with a 2.6.26 kernel), except for the W-LAN. After a few days watching for the file system to break again, I updated to a 2.6.29 kernel (where I could get my Intel PRO/Wireless 5300 AGN card to work) and managed to install the NVIDIA driver for it, and I haven’t had a single problem yet, so the file system corruption seems to be indeed a problem with Jaunty. I’ll try again with Jaunty once it’s out, and if the problem still happens investigate the issue a bit more (this means, try with a different kernel :P).

I’ve been using Debian for a week now and other than the surprisingly slow installation and no nice restricted-manager helping you with driver installation, I’m quite comfortable with it. There’s some stuff from Ubuntu which I miss (like command-not-found), but nothing big, and having testing, unstable and experimental to get newer packages from is cool. I still prefer Ubuntu, but it’s good to know that if something ever happens to it (just purely theoretically) I could live with Debian; and, in any case, I’ll keep this installation around (it only takes up 6GB, so there’s no reason to remove it once I get Ubuntu running fine again).

Anyway, thanks if you’re still reading this, and sorry for this long, boring post! The next ones will be more interesting, I promise! ;).

By the way, I’ve recently started using Identi.ca, so if for some weird reason you want to read more boring stuff from me, see my page there.

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Install package «ubuntu-dev-tools» (version 0.63 or higher) and then do the following for every distribution for which you want to build packages (replacing "jaunty" everywhere with the codename of the distribution you want; both Ubuntu and Debian releases will work): «ln -s /usr/bin/pbuilder-dist /usr/local/bin/pbuilder-jaunty; pbuilder-jaunty create». Then, you can compile any package by running «pbuilder-jaunty build <package>_<version>.dsc».

If you prefer cowbuilder instead of pbuilder (the first one stores the chroots uncompressed, so they take up more disk space but don't need to be uncompressed every time) just replace «pbuilder» with «cowbuilder» everywhere above.

Long version

So you have created a new package for Ubuntu or you've done some changes to an existing one and now you want to create the .deb package. For many new contributors the obvious way to achieve this is  to just run dpkg-buildpackage, but this is not enough to ensure that the package will build once it is uploaded to Ubuntu.

Using dpkg-buildpackage you won't know if there's some build dependency missing in debian/control if you already have it installed,  stuff on your system may influence the build process, and so on. Even further, the package you're creating is most likely intended for the current development version of Ubuntu (at the time of writing this, Jaunty) but you are still running the stable release (Intrepid), or the release is the same but having to pollute with all dependencies needed to build a package is not ideal. I guess you get the point…

So, what can we do about this? Well, tools like pbuilder come to the rescue, allowing you to easily set up a minimal chroot where you can test-build packages for any Ubuntu/Debian release. Its usage is even more simplified by a wrapper script, pbuilder-dist, which makes having several pbuilder instances at once (like, one for Intrepid, one for Jaunty, etc. ) a walk in the park.

To use it, first of all get the latest ubuntu-dev-tools version from intrepid-backports and ensure that you have pbuilder installed. Then, create symlinks for every chroot you want, calling them pbuilder-intrepid, pbuilder-jaunty… (If you are running the 64 bit version of Ubuntu, you can even create an i386 chroot, calling it pbuilder-intrepid-i386). To create those symlink, use a command like the following one: «sudo ln -s /usr/bin/pbuilder-dist /usr/local/bin/pbuilder-intrepid» (changing the last bit to whatever chroot you want, as described before).

Note: You can also use cowbuilder instead of pbuilder, by simply installing the package cowdancer and giving the symlinks names starting with "cowbuilder-" instead of "pbuilder-". The pbuilder-dist wrapper can handle them both, and the difference between them is that pbuilder compresses the chroot as a tarball (thus taking up less disk space, but having to uncompress it every time you do something to it and so being slower), and cowbuilder doesn't (so it's faster but needs a bit more disk space); personally, I prefer the later one. Now that you have your symlinks setup, you can create the symlinks by running «pbuilder-intrepid create» (changing «-intrepid» to whatever you've named your symlinks, of course). This will take some time, as it will need to download and install a complete Ubuntu base system. Afterwards, you'll need to keep your chroots up to date, by running «pbuilder-intrepid update» from time to time. All files will go to ~/pbuilder/ (unless you change the directory by setting the PBUILDFOLDER environment variable -and yes, it is called the same for cowbuilder-dist-).

To build your package using the chroot, just do «pbuilder-intrepid build <packagename>_<version>.dsc» and watch the magic happen. Once it finishes you'll find the resulting files in ~/pbuilder/. (In case you get the error that some dependencies cannot be downloaded, try updating the chroot as explained above).

There's still a lot more stuff which I could tell you about pbuilder/cowbuilder, but I'll end this introductory post here… If you have any question don't hesitate to ask on #ubuntu-motu (after being a good kid and reading all relevant manpages ;)).

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So, why am I writing this? You all know our friend Launchpad, right? Now let’s have a look at Debian’s BTS… One word, intimidating. At least this was what I thought the first time I saw it, so I decided that I would write this post to introduce you to it’s basic use (it doesn’t make much sense, as there’s a big link to the help on the start page, but well… perhaps if you read it here you’ll fell more like reading it… or not :P).

Reporting a bug

How does it work? Just send an e-mail to submit@bugs.debian.org, with the following content:

Package: <package name>
Version: <package version>

<Bug description here>

Easy, isn’t it? The mail subject will be the title for the bug, and the version field can even be omitted if you don’t know it… Now, there’s something more you should know as an Ubuntu user: if you want to recognize a bug as coming from Ubuntu (for example if you are forwarding it from Launchpad), add the two following lines after the package name:

User: ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com
Usertags: origin-ubuntu hardy

OK. Now this is all. Just send such a mail and after some minutes you will receive a message telling you the bug number it got. If you want to send additional information just mail to <bug number>@bugs.debian.org. You won’t need much time to feel comfortable with it ;).

Searching bugs

Searching for bugs can still be somewhat unfriendly. If you think so, this might help a bit: «sudo aptitude install reportbug-ng». Now look on Applications -> System Tools. Now you are ready to rock on forwarding bugs to Debian!

5 comments
© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2007. | Permalink | License | Post tags: Debian