Older blog entries for mbanck (starting at number 5)

I had to work with OpenOffice.org for the first time for a presentation at the uni (it's a team effort, so I was not able to force magicpoint on the others yet). After some reorganizing of my harddisk last weekend, I managed to free enough space in order to install OpenOffice.org from unstable on my notebook, while at the uni, the admin installed vanilla OOo-1.1. Boy, does that make a difference, the Ximian patches sure look nice. Kudos to the Debian OOo-team.

While the presentation I currently work on is based on an older one which was hopeless in terms of visual consistency, this article seems to indicate that OpenOffice Impress could be an alternative to Magicpoint for more involved presentations. I managed to get unattended, looped slide-shows working in OpenOffice yesterday, so making a generic Debian presentation which could be run unattended at booths during trade shows would be nice to have I think. That's actually something I've been thinking about for a long time now, but so far I had no luck getting it to work in Magicpoint.

I also managed to get my notebook's 3c556 NIC working on GNU Mach-1.x. Now I have to find out why SSH currently does not prompt me for a password when in X on Debian GNU/Hurd.

Finally processed my first NM applicant, Raphael Goulais, today. I hope I did a decent job, these days the NM process seems to go much smoother and I would hate to block that being a bad Application Manager.

I am still a bit ill, so I did not do much Debian development over the weekend, but hacked a bit on OpenBabel. Otherwise, I took some time shifting around data on partitions to have enough free space on /usr to install GNOME. And it seems to rock big time. The only beef I have is that evolution cannot properly import GnomeCard files (it loses the addresses), how whack is that?. Still, I cannot wait to get all the good stuff on my unstable notebook Robert Love blogs about.

Got a new notebook, a HP OmniBook 6000. It's actually my dad's three-year-old-work-notebook, so that's not much of an advancement performance-wise, but at least now I finally have a 1024x768 display, an integrated NIC and, uhm, a working battery, all of which my old notebook lacked. I should probably get a new harddisk, too, as the 20GB in my old notebook are almost full and I currently only have an old 4GB harddisk in my new notebook.

I already tried installing d-i Beta 2 on it a couple of times, and I was heavily impressed by the work of the debian-boot team. XFree86 configuration does not seem to be integrated perfectly yet, but otherwise installing sarge rocks. Unfortunately, the internal NIC seems to be not supported by Linux-2.0 and thus GNU Mach-1.x, but a bit of hacking should get that working eventually, I hope.

Being a bit ill today, I did not go to university but stayed in bed, at least fixing a bug in OpenBabel which popped up today.

I've posted the results of the strawpoll on the proper usage of @debian.org email addresses to the debian-project list. It seems most people think it is alright to use them in Debian or Free Software related matters. Most also did not approve to use @debian.org as a general-purpose email address or for stuff completely unrelated to the Debian project and its principles.

It must now be discussed what to draw from the results and whether to update the DMUP or rather amend the Developer's Reference to document best practise on @debian.org usage.

Sometimes, things just happen spontaneously and develop their own dynamics. About a week ago, Roland McGrath promptly committed a contributed fix for two trivial typos in ext2fs to the Hurd CVS, after months of inactivity on GNU Hurd. Some days later, some newbie asked how to compile GNUMach-1.3 on #hurd. It turned out that nobody had yet tried to compile it with gcc-3.3. Alfred M. Szmidt fixed the compile errors and volunteered to maintain the GNUMach-1.x branch, which got abandoned by its maintainers in favor of GNUMach-2.0 (which has stability issues though, and does not get used much). Again, Roland promptly committed the fixes, this time even considering a possible GNUMach-1.4 release. From there, things took off, and Marco Gerards fixed a couple of long-standing and annoying bugs in GNUMach in the last couple of days.

In related news, Gürkan Sengün has made available a public Debian GNU/Hurd box. If you want to explore the Hurd a bit or port some Debian packages, mail him for an account.

Apparently, I finally managed to fix OpenBabel so that the test-suite can be run from a build-dir, too. In the end, I had to revert to C++ (looking up stuff in my book), a complete defeat for my C skills.

At least the last show-stopper for 1.100.2 (from my perspective) has now been fixed. This release should really be pushed out now, this header-bug has been left unfixed for a couple of months too long.