Colors of Noise

The sixth Debian Groupware Meeting was held in the LinuxHotel, Essen, Germany. We had one remote hacker from NYC which brings the number of attendants up to nine - an all time high! This is a short summary of what happened during the weekend:

• Sogo 2.0.5 got uploaded to unstable and work on OpenChange support is advancing.

• D-push (the rebranded version of z-push) got split and restructured to better handle different backends. An update in experimental is pending.

• Giraffe's git (the rebranded version of zaraffa) got updated to 7.1. There's some more work needed to get this into the archive though.

• There's been progress on getting Kolab3 into Debian starting with libkolabxml 0.8.4 and libkolab 0.4.2 (also needed by kde-pim).

• mozilla-devscripts now handles Iceowl as well so packaging calendaring extensions like this one becomes even more useful.

• Icedove and Iceowl bugsquashing. New versions were uploaded to unstable and experimental. The bug count trends look quiet promising but we really need help for #658664.

• We did some davmail <-> iceowl/icedove interop testing.

• The Groupware Page got updated

• We had some discussions about calendar and addressbook detection and autoconfiguration. For CalDAV/CardDAV there's a specification available already but there seems to be no client implementation in Debian so we started13 to work on it.

• We had a nice barbecue enjoying the first warm days.

Following up on using Debian on the WeTab with GNOME Shell I figured accelerated video using the built in CrystalHD to save battery power and CPU cycles would be nice to have. There's even a Debian package available but not for gstreamer 1.0 (which is used by GNOME 3.6) so I had a look at gstreamer's plugin writers guide and porting guide and updated the driver. Packages are here until there's a new upstream version or Debian package release.

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Following up on using Debian on the WeTab with GNOME Shell I had a look at automatically adjusting the screen orientation when rotating the device.

The accelerometer is handled in the asus_laptop module since kernel 3.2, so this shows up in /proc/bus/input/devices:

I: Bus=0019 Vendor=0000 Product=0000 Version=0000
N: Name="Pegatron Lucid Tablet Accelerometer"
P: Phys=pega_accel/input0
S: Sysfs=/devices/platform/asus_laptop/input/input4
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=event4 js0 
B: PROP=0
B: EV=9
B: ABS=7

Whenever the screen orientation changes the driver emits a udev event. The helper in /lib/udev/accelerometer processes it thanks to /lib/udev/rules.d/61-accelerometer.rules, determines the orientation and adds the ID_INPUT_ACCELEROMETER_ORIENTATION property to the event which can be checked with udevadm monitor --property:

UDEV  [5778.534171] change   /devices/platform/asus_laptop/input/input4 (input)
ABS=7
ACTION=change
DEVPATH=/devices/platform/asus_laptop/input/input4
EV=9
ID_FOR_SEAT=input-platform-asus_laptop
ID_INPUT=1
ID_INPUT_ACCELEROMETER=1
ID_INPUT_ACCELEROMETER_ORIENTATION=right-up
ID_PATH=platform-asus_laptop
ID_PATH_TAG=platform-asus_laptop
MODALIAS=input:b0019v0000p0000e0000-e0,3,kra0,1,2,mlsfw
NAME="Pegatron Lucid Tablet Accelerometer"
PHYS="pega_accel/input0"
PRODUCT=19/0/0/0
PROP=0
SEQNUM=1550
SUBSYSTEM=input
TAGS=:seat:
UDEV_LOG=3
USEC_INITIALIZED=6154288

This is captured by gnome-settings-daemon (>=3.2) that adjusts the screen rotation using xrandr2 accordingly. This can be checked by running gnome-settings-daemon with --debug. The old way of using xinput events is no longer supported.

Unfortunately Debian's udev has a minor bug that misdetects the input device so this patch is needed to have the screen orientation changed automatically on the WeTab.

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Following up on using Debian on the WeTab with GNOME Shell I've put together a bit of GTK+3 CSS to make it more touch friendly. It's in the same git repo as the OSK extension. If you put the gtk.css into ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css scrollbars will be a bit larger and the padding between widgets will be increased over the default theme:

This will need more work since some of the sliders look a bit a awkward now so any enhancements will be greatly appreciated. The docs for GTK3's CSS are here.

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Running Debian on the WeTab with GNOME Shell without an external keyboard works pretty nicely. The on screen keyboard - if enabled via the accessibility menu - folds out automatically in the shell itself within text input fields. To have this within GTK+3/GTK+2 applications you need libcaribou-gtk3-module and libcaribou-gtk-module installed. For other cases I stitched together a small extension that puts a keyboard "Button" prominently into the middle of the panel. Clicking/touching it will fold it out, clicking again will hide it again. You can fetch it from

git clone git://honk.sigxcpu.org/git/gnome-shell-oskb-extension.git ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/OnScreenKeyboardButton@sigxcpu.org

and activate it via

 gsettings set org.gnome.shell enabled-extensions "['OnScreenKeyboardButton@sigxcpu.org']"

For kinetic scrolling in Iceweasel I'm currently using Grab and Drag which is not yet packaged for Debian.

Thanks to the Debian's GNOME packaging team gnome-shell 3.6 is already available in experimental.

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Finally found the time to add external ui support to network-manager-iodine. This makes for nicer authentication dialogs when using Gnome Shell and warrants a 0.0.4 release. Debian packages can be fetched from unstable once they passed the NEW queue.

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Interactively installing Debian virtual machines with virt-install without having to download anything in advance can already be done by pointing it to a Debian mirror via --location. But you can also add files to the initrd after downloading using --initrd-inject. Upstreams intended use is for kickstart files but we can also feed it a preseed.cfg to automate the whole installation:

virt-install --connect=qemu:///system \
             --location=http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer\-i386 \
             --initrd-inject=/path/to/preseed.cfg \
             --extra-args="auto" \
             --name d-i --ram=512 \
             --disk=pool=default,size=5,format=qcow2,bus=virtio

preseed.cfg is a regular preseed file (as described in the Debian Wiki) in your local filesystem. I'm using this one for Squeeze and Wheezy VMs. It must be named preseed.cfg in order for d-i to pick it up from the initrd. This also works for URLs like qemu+ssh://<remotehost>/system/ since virt-install uses libvirt's streaming API to upload the kernel and modified initrd to the remote host.

In case you're running this on an i386 you'll need this fix which already sits in experimental.

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Eric Blake and myself had the chance to talk about libvirt at FLOSS Weekly hosted by Randall Schwartz and Simon Phipps. It's available as video and audio stream.

This went out to d-d-a already but I figured that this might be of interest here too:

The fifth Debian Groupware Meeting was held in the LinuxHotel, Essen, Germany. Eight persons attended which is an all time high! This is a short summary of what happened during the weekend:

• We pushed a ESR (extended support release) version of icedove including l10n and the calendaring extension to unstable. By cherry-picking lots of build-fixes from iceweasel we made the testing transition getting rid of the old 3.X version.

• Since iceowl (the standalone calendar) is not maintained upstream anymore we're keeping it in experimental only for now. A new version got uploaded including updated l10n.

• A new upstream version of evolution-mapi was upload to sid fixing an FTBFS.

• d-push 1.5.8 (the rebranded version of z-push) got uploaded to unstable including translation updates and adaption to php 5.4.0.

• Lots of progress was made on packaging SOGo and related components and it's now quiet close to an upload to sid.

• Work on OpenChange included looking into using the version in Debian for SOGo packaging as well as fixing Samba4 issues that broke (among other things) the OpenChange build.

• Progress was made on packaging Zarafa ZCP for Debian (rebranded as giraffe). The packages are working but rebranding is not yet complete.

• About 60 evolution bugs where either closed or commented on.

• As usual the Groupware page got updated.

• The meetings 5th anniversary was celebrated with a barbecue.

During FOSDEM I finally got around to hack on a iodine plugin for network manager. Given a suitably prepared server on the other end this allows you to tunnel connections over DNS when all other traffic is firewalled. The basic configuration only needs the domain name set:

You can grab the sources from git.gnome.org, a Debian package is also available.

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