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A long while ago I wrote about installing redmine as a normal user on debian. I've been using and administering a redmine installation for quite some time now and I'm very happy with it. Since the new stable release of redmine was released in june, I decided to give it another try.

The redmine installation manual is already very detailed. These are the steps I followed to get a simple redmine instance running on my system.

During the last two days I spent some time to implement part of the proposed features for distcheck/ edos-distcheck. Since everybody is at debconf and talk is silver, but code is gold, I hope that a real implementation can get the ball rolling and get us closer to a stable release of the next generation of edos/mancoosi tools.

In particular this post is about the new YAML output format for distcheck. The rational to use YAML is to have a data structure that is at the same time human and machine friendly.

After reading this interesting blog post from Petter Reinholdtsen, I've decided to repeat his experiments and save the results in with dudf-save .

apt-get and aptitide were two missing competitors of the misc competition. However it is important and interesting how these two tools compete against other solvers submitted to MISC. In this post I want to present two simple tools to convert cudf documents to something that apt-get based tools can handle. Cudf and debian share many characteristics but also have important semantic differences. One important difference is about installing multiple versions of the same package.

I use rssh to allow restricted shell access to my servers.

Note to Self

If you use github.com to host your projects these are two things to remember:

• if you want a download url that is different from http://github.com/$user/$proj/tarball/master you can create a tag in your repo, push it to github and enjoy and new link in the download tab. Then you can download your project as http://github.com/$user/$proj/tarball/0.1 where 0.1 is the tag.

debtree is a fantastic tool to create colorful graphs of package dependencies. One small shortcoming is that the user cannot provide a Packages.gz file directly to be used as repository. Since debtree is based on the excellent apt_pkg library, it is actually not that difficult to convince apt to look in a different location. To change debtree (and apt-get_ default behaviour you just need to create a new apt-get repository and then set the environment variable APT_CONFIG appropriately.

So ...

After the latest Xorg upgrade I started experiencing multiple problems concerning the suspend/resume cycle on my laptop. Today I took sometimes off to debug the situation. It seems that the culprit is the activation of the KMS on the XOrg package that landed in unstable in December.

In the same spirit of this blog post http://chistera.yi.org/~adeodato/blog/106_fakeapt.html , this is a simple bash function to simulate an aptitude run on a given status and packages list.

to install skype on a debian unstable machine :

• get the skype package here http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu
• dpkg -i --force-architecture skype-debian_2.0.0.72-1_i386.deb

now we need to fix a bunch of dependencies:

• apt-get -f install
• apt-get install libqt4-core libqt4-gui ia32-libs-gtk
• get the 32 bit version of libuuid from here : http://packages.debian.org/sid/i386/libuuid1/download
• copy the library in /usr/lib32

run skype.

blahhhhhh . It used to be easier...