GNOME for system administrators - Jessie edition
For those who couldn’t be here, as well as those who were here and disappointed to see me cut through the last third for timing reasons, here are the slides:
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Following the DPL game call for players, here are my nominations for the fantastic four (in alphabetical order) :
These are four randomly selected people among those who share an understanding of the Debian community, a sense of leadership, and the ability to drive people forward with solutions.
GNOME 3.4 for Debian wheezy is shaping up quite well. A handful of bugs remain to be fixed, but we are now in a polishing phase, as expected given the freeze status.
With upstream introducing heavy changes in new versions, it is time to think of what will happen with GNOME when we introduce version 3.8 in unstable. Namely, there are two categories of changes that have a heavy impact on Debian:
Upstream is not hostile to people working on making their modules compatible with these setups (non-3D, non-systemd). However, there is a limit to what the Debian GNOME team can do, and people have to make choices.
The consensus in the Debian GNOME team is to focus the extra amount of work we can provide to the fallback code. We are already in touch with other distributions and people who are interested in keeping the differences with upstream GNOME minimal. Our common goal is to be able to provide a GNOME installation for all Linux systems, with or without 3D.
However, none of us is willing to spend time on getting GNOME to work without systemd. We will not work actively against it either, but some components will certainly recommend systemd, and the functionality with other init systems will be degraded. So if people want to keep GNOME fully working on non-Linux systems, now is the time to start hacking on the missing pieces for this to work. For the time being, it does not look infeasible – although we don’t know what jessie will be made of.
Have you ever wondered one of those?
For those who weren’t at Mini-DebConf Paris 2012 last week, let me share here again the slides:
Large deployment of GNOME from the administrator’s perspective
These questions, and many others, will find the beginning of an answer here. At the very least, I hope to show people leads on where to find relevant information for their needs about administrating GNOME systems.
Today I tried to translate a German sentence posted by mistake on an English IRC channel.
For that, I used Google translation.
I think there is a message here about what country KDE comes from…
So, there is some history of organisations doing a poor job at managing security bugs.
We saw the “This is not really a security hole” jokes just to avoid having bad statistics in the front page. We saw the “OMFG you must update to the latest version RIGHT NOW and no I’m not telling why” panic.
We still frequently see security fixes hidden in unrelated public commits, just to make them harder to backport for distributors.
But really, there is absolutely no match for that. Kudos for setting a new standard in the worse way of dealing with security issues, guys.
Update: one of the developers has started insulting a pair of professional IT security experts who came and tried to educate him. Awesome reading, don’t forget the popcorn.
When George Papandreou announced its will to submit the European “help“ program to the approbation of the Greek people, I don’t know whether he wanted to scare people, but man, he really achieved something. From Wall Street to the Bundestag, through the Élysée Palace, they are all in a state of advanced panic. There’s a joke that’s been circulating since: for next Hallowe’en, disguise yourself as a referendum.
Yes, these guys are afraid. Afraid of the people. They are afraid because it is now clear that their interests are not the same as the interests of the people. And what do you do when you are afraid? Well, you find yourself some way out, often by lying.
And indeed, Mrs Merkel and Mr Sarkozy have been repeating over and over something that has been then repeated over and over by most so-called journalists: that Greeks can only choose between two endings:
That’s it: Mrs Merkel and Mr Sarkozy are outrageous liars.
There is another option for Greek people:
3. they don’t pay their debts to banks and rich people, and they stay in the Euro zone.It’s as simple as that: nothing in European treaties can force a country to leave the Euro zone. And nothing in these treaties can force a country to honor their bonds. Greece is a sovereign state and, as such, can choose not to honor its sovereign debt. And choose to stay in the Euro zone: why would they want to go out? What does it have to do with the currency those bonds have been emitted in? If California were to cease payment of its public debt (something not likely to happen at all, hmm?), would it have to abandon the Dollar?
But here is a thing that has been forbidden for a long time in European treaties: for a country to help financially another one to pay its debts. This rule was introduced by Jacques Delors (a man who knows what being European means) precisely in order to avoid the contagion we are facing currently because of stupid “help” plans all across Europe. Yes: the whole idea of Merkozy’s grand plan to “save Euro” while “helping Greece” (a weird kind of help, starving people, really) is illegal. So in addition to being liars, Mrs Merkel and Mr Sarkozy are delinquents.
So let Greece cease payment of its debt. A few banks will sink: so what? This will create less unemployment than letting our whole economy sink. European States will guarantee citizens’ savings up to 30 k€, that’s one of the other clever European rules (some countries guarantee more). Other people, rich people only, will lose their savings. Will that prevent you from sleeping? Not me. But that could prevent from sleeping a number of friends of Mrs Merkel’s and Mr Sarkozy’s.
And wouldn’t that be a good reason for lying and violating European treaties?