Colors of Noise

In case somebody wants to run KDE together with some GTK+ based applications (like Iceweasel or Icedove) having a consistent style as well as look and feel between KDE and GTK+ applications is a nice thing to have. QtCurve together with xsettings-kde and gtk-qt-engine makes this easily possible:

aptitude install gtk-qt-engine kde-config-gtk-style qtcurve xsettings-kde

Then adjust the following settings:

• Settings->System-Settings->Appearance, Style set Style to QtCurve
• Settings->System-Settings->Appearance, GTK Styles under Use another style: select QtCurve
• Settings->System-Settings->Appearance, GTK Styles under Firefox and Thunderbird click Install scrollbar fix...

Log off and right back in. Now your GTK+ applications should blend nicely into the QtCurve KDE look. xsettings-kde additionally bridges KDE settings like double click speed and icon theme via xsettings to GTK+ applications.

Now back to using gnome-shell...

Here are some more examples of libguestfs usage:

What kernels, modules and packages are in a (currently powered off) libvirt based virtual machine vmfoo:

virt-inspector -c qemu:///system vmfoo

Show free space in virtual machine vmfoo:

virt-df -c qemu:///system vmfoo

List file systems:

virt-list-filesystems -c qemu:///system -l vmfoo

Edit /etc/passwd in vmfoo:

virt-edit -c qemu:///system lenny-base-clone /etc/passwd

Tell guestfish to mount all filesystems of virtual machine vmfoo for more complex inspection and manipulation tasks like LVM operations, partitioning, resizing or filesystem check or creation:

guestfish $(virt-inspector -c qemu:///system --ro-fish vmfoo)

Debian packages are still on alioth.

I've finally updated the libguestfs Debian packages to 1.0.84 getting them back in sync with upstream. Download instructions are on the pkg-libvirt's wiki page.

Fetching files from a vm image with guestfish is as simple as:

guestfish --ro -a lenny-base-clone.img -m /dev/debian/root download /etc/passwd /tmp/passwd

After hacking around #561991 by running debirf as root we now do pass the testsuite again. The new version includes fuse support as well as the hivex tools to manipulate windows registries.

The source for the Debian package is available at git.debian.org. The next step will be to split out the appliance so we can fetch that one via http and upload libguestfs to contrib.

Here's a short overview of 3.0 source format support in git-buildpackage 0.4.64:

• git-import-dsc & git-import-dscs import 3.0 (quilt and native) format packages.
• git-import-orig: imports gzip and bz2 compressed archives. Other formats will be enabled once pristine-tar supports them (#499489).
• git-buildpackage handles creating gzip, bzip2, lzma and xz compressed tarballs with the --git-compression option although it could get a bit smarter and autodetect the compression type.

One loose end is the handling of multiple upstream tarballs (#561071, #561072). I'd be great to hear from people already using this feature how this can best be added into the gbp workflow.

The newer kids in town gbp-clone, gbp-pull (for keeping the repo up to date when using team maintenance) and gbp-pq (for managing the quilt patch-queue) don't care about the underlying source package format. These three are a bit underdocumented in the manual but information about the workflow is in the wiki.

Release 1.0beta1 of Iceowl-extension (also known as Lightning), the calendaring extensions for Icedove, is now available in experimental. This version works with Icedove 3.0.1 which also lives in experimental at the moment.

Open TODOs for Iceowl:

• reenable standalone build
• don't use internal cairo
• finish branding

Iceowl's current packaging git is here:

http://git.debian.org/?p=users/agx/iceowl.git

Any help on the above issues is greatly appreciated. Other open tasks that need fixing in order to get things in shape for Squeeze:

• Updating icedove-l10n and iceowl-l10n - both packages are looking for a maintainer
• Adding an icedove-dev package for 3.0 ...
• ... so we can build Enigmail for Icedove 3.0

I've just uploaded Icedove 3.0 to Debian experimental. The package is heavily based on Alexanders work in Ubuntu and Chris did most of the hard work.

It's currently named icedove-3.0 so you can (for now) install this version in parallel to Icedove 2. This version copies over your Icedove 2 profile so it doesn't get messed up.

As long as the package is sitting in new you can grab it from the pkg-mozext repository:

deb http://pkg-mozext.alioth.debian.org/packages sid/i386/
deb http://pkg-mozext.alioth.debian.org/packages sid/all/

We now need help with going through the Debian bugreports against Icedove.

If you want to help out: grab a bug, check if it's fixed in Icedove 3 and if it is, simply mark it as fixed in 3.0~rc2-2 in the bts:

bts fixed <bugnumber> 3.0~rc2-2

Once we're confident the package doesn't break everything we'll rename the binary package to icedove so it replaces the default Icedove on upgrades.

If you want to help out with patches: Git is here

git clone git://git.debian.org/pkg-mozilla/icedove.git

As already mentioned on <pkg-libvirt-discuss@lists.alioth.debian.org> libvirt 0.7.4-2 (currently in experimental) runs qemu and kvm processes as libvirt-qemu:kvm instead of root allowing you to use features like bridged networking without having to run the emulator itself with full privileges.

Kvm 88+dfsg-3 supports ksm to safe memory when running several similar virtual machines. On a recent linux kernel just do a

echo 1 > /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/run

to activate it. Then run two similar virtual machines and see how /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/pages_shared increases.

Thanks to work of Jan and Micheal Debian now also ships kvm's stable branch qemu-kvm.

I've finally added basic Negotiate (Kerberos) support to libsoup. Git is available here. Using:

git clone http://git.debian.org/?p=users/agx/libsoup.git;a=summary
./autogen.sh
make
# for nautilus:
killall gvfsd
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=libsoup/.libs/ gvfsd
# epiphany:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=libsoup/.libs/ epiphany
# totem:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=libsoup/.libs/ totem

you can protect your music, files, whatever on a webserver using mod_auth_kerb and access them without storing a passwort just using your Kerberos ticket. Would be nice to get this merged #587145.

As of git-buildpackage 0.4.60 gbp-pull supports --redo-pq which additionally recreates the patch-queue branch after a pull. Now you can keep your clone fresh with one command.

Inspired by tools developed by Debian's OCaml maintainers git-buildpackage now ships gbp-pull that can be used to keep your debian-, upstream- and pistine-tar branch up to date when doing team maintenance.